Label Colors and the Black Text Bug

Someone wrote in to say the labels on the seed result map had turned black and unreadable while they were playing, and asked for the old text back or a way to change it. They were right, and the cause was mine. Fixing it changed what sits behind the label text, and it made the label colors something you can set yourself.

Why the labels went black

The result map has drawn its labels from marker data since 1.6.01, and each label carried a black outline hugging the letters to keep them readable over the map. That outline was drawn with a CSS technique that depends on a rendering-engine feature older engines do not apply to HTML text. Where the feature is missing, the black outline was painted on top of the white letters instead of behind them, thick enough to fill them in completely.

So it was not their setup and not an extension. Anyone reading the site through a browser with an older rendering engine would have seen it. In-game overlay browsers are the clearest case, since they tend to lag well behind the standalone browser, and people read this map with the game running. Only the wider layout was hit badly. On phone-width screens the outline was thin enough that the letters stayed legible.

The labels no longer use that technique at all. The glow that replaced the outline is built from a method that has worked in every browser for many years, so the labels render the same everywhere. Thank you to the person who reported it. On an up-to-date browser the labels looked fine, so the report is the only reason I knew.

Outline out, glow in

What sits behind the letters is now a glow that disperses outward instead of an outline hugging them.

The outline was there for a reason, and it is the same reason a glow is awkward: on a two-line label, the glow belonging to the second line painted over the letters of the first and ate them. Every label is now drawn twice, once as glow only and once as the letters on top. Both lines of letters sit above the whole glow, so a glow cannot cover a letter no matter how far it spreads.

Font Size is now Font Config

The Font Size row in the result map's Settings modal now reads Font Config, and it holds two groups side by side: size and color.

size is the stepper that was already there, and it behaves as it did: one-pixel steps, an offset of up to 15 pixels in either direction, 1 pixel as the smallest rendered size.

color is new. The first picker sets the color of the label text and the second sets the color of the glow behind it. They start as white text on a black glow, which is what the labels have always been, so leaving the row alone changes nothing. Both save in this browser and carry across seeds and sessions the way the size does, and Reset to default puts them back along with the size and the map filters.

One thing to expect the first time you change the glow color: the map is dark, so a light glow reads as having far more reach than a dark one at the same setting. A black glow's outer edge disappears into the map while a white one stays visible. I tightened the dispersion because of that.