How to get G-Force to use Whitecap track text format

[cellness]

I've purchased the G-Force gold product. I've downloaded and installed both G-Force and Whitecap using iTunes on Mac OS X. Both plugins work well, but I want to make one modification to G-Force.

I think the track display text is very nice under Whitecap, but horrible under G-Force.

I've managed to figure out how to use and modify the "Track Text.txt" file to make the text appear in the bottom left and be left justified , but I need help with the following:

1) Make the track text always be white
2) Make the track text appear nice and anti-aliased like it does in Whitecap.

Thanks!
Marcel

[ethan_greer]

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

You don't actually want track text to always be white in G-Force because sometimes the background color is white, making white text invisible. What you want is to change where it says "Pen=fader" to "Pen=1" This will make it so the text is always the foreground color, i.e., a color that contrasts with the background color.

If you don't want the text to react with the flow fields, change the Epen setting to 0.

Please note that I don't have G-Force here at work so I might be misremembering these codes and keywords. But I'm sure that I'm close. Someone wanna back me up on these? In any case, if you figured out how to edit the track text file, then this should hopefully at least set you in the right direction.

For the anti-aliasing, I have no idea.

[cellness]

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

You don't actually want track text to always be white in G-Force because sometimes the background color is white, making white text invisible. What you want is to change where it says "Pen=fader" to "Pen=1" This will make it so the text is always the foreground color, i.e., a color that contrasts with the background color.

If you don't want the text to react with the flow fields, change the Epen setting to 0.

Please note that I don't have G-Force here at work so I might be misremembering these codes and keywords. But I'm sure that I'm close. Someone wanna back me up on these? In any case, if you figured out how to edit the track text file, then this should hopefully at least set you in the right direction.

For the anti-aliasing, I have no idea.

Well, thank you for the welcome!

I guess I should have specified that I already did set Pen to 1 and Epen to 0 prior to posting my original message. I still would like the text to be white. I can put up with sometimes having the text washed out.

I guess I'm used to the iTunes built-in visualizer, which always has the text white. I believe it is based on G-Force and the text rarely gets washed out.

Thanks!
Marcel

[cellness]

I've started adding album cover art to my music, and wouldn't you know it, when G-Force displays the cover art, the track text is pure white and displayed nice and pretty. Perhaps it's a 8 vs 32-bit thing?

Anyway, since I'm going to add cover art, my problem is solved. However, I figure it should be something that should be configurable regardless of album cover art.

Thanks!
Marcel

[cellness]

After doing some more poking around, I found the info I needed in the boot.txt file.

The track text displays "nice" by my definition when it is an overlay. I find the text ugly when it is a sprite.

What I could have done if I didn't have cover art, would have been to define somewhere to always use an overlay for text, not a sprite. I could have done this in the boot.txt file, or perhaps in the startup.txt file.

Anyway, this thread may be useful to somebody in the future.

Thanks!
Marcel

[cellness]

FYI, in G-Force version 2.8.1 or later, this can now be controlled via the PREF_TRACK_TEXT_APPEARANCE (or TTAp) setting. I always want an overlay, so I set TTAp to 1.

Marcel