Preferences window taller than the main window (and possibly other dialogs are too?)

[NQNStudios]

With UI scaling in play, having some dialogs be taller than the main game window poses a problem because the player might get important buttons cut off at the bottom of the screen when they thought they found a scale that fit. I know for sure this happens on my screens at 1.5x with the preferences window. The intro dialog is taller than the main window, but not by much, it's probably fine. I can't think of any others.

(Maybe scenarios can make text dialogs bigger than the window? that would be more thorny to fix.)

I think the goal should be for dialogs to be smaller than the main window generally. For preferences, we could achieve this with pagination. There's also room to make minor adjustments in row spacing, and the display alignment widget has extra padding.

[CelticMinstrel]

I guess it makes sense to make a guideline to constrain dialogues to be not too much larger than the main window. I don't really want to force them to be the same size or smaller, though. Maybe they should never be higher than the width of the main window?

and the display alignment widget has extra padding.

I think it would look really bad without that extra padding though, so I wouldn't support removing it.

[NQNStudios]

Something really diabolical we could do--since we can tell how big the player's monitor is through SFML--would be to detect dialogs that are bigger than the screen, and stuff the controls in a paginated stack programatically 😆

[CelticMinstrel]

That really is very diabolical. I don't think I like it…

[NQNStudios]

It's very bad when scale gets set to a point where you can no longer see the scale buttons in the preferences (because it's then impossible to reverse this state). One way to fix this (which makes it less of a big deal if some things don't fit on the screen) is to move the scale buttons up under the screen position widget. Which actually makes a lot of sense, scale and positioning being next to each other and the various miscellaneous on/off toggles below that with nothing mission-critical underneath.

[NQNStudios]

If I put the scale options at the very top, I can recover from setting my scale all the way to 4 (which is enormously larger than my screen.)

[CelticMinstrel]

A size that's enormously larger than your screen shouldn't even be offered as an option.

Also, it's always possible to reverse the state by manually editing or resetting the preferences file. Not that that's acceptable for a state someone got into by selecting an option in the UI though.