Ths is just a thought, but when adjusting the quality perhaps only the in game objects should be affected. The menus would be more readable and better looking, and aren't really relevant when the game starts anyway, right?
There is actually a reason I'm not doing that; I'll see if I can explain it:
(skip to the dotted line at the bottom if you want a summary)
1) In order to change the graphic quality (the screen resolution, in pixels, specifically), I have to unload and reload all 2d and 3d images/models/objects. This is a physical limitation of DirectX / Direct3D and there's nothing I can do about it. Changing the resolution unloads all media from memory automatically.
This means that every time we change the resolution, we have to be veeery careful about what we have loaded and not, because we can easily break things by loading something more than once or trying to use something that isn't loaded. This is why I chose not to allow players to change the resolution once the game is loaded up, and why the choice is made before you do anything else.
Also, different monitors "like" different resolutions. It's impossible to pick a single resolution that will look perfect to all computers.
Impossible to get the perfect resolution + changing resolution after the game starts is problematic = the resolution on the title screen has to be variable and therefore the quality will be directly related to the resolution.
2) In order to keep the quality the exact same on the main menu, no matter the quality setting, we would have to create 2d images at each resolution that the game will support. For now, that's about 12 resolutions. Later on, there will be even more. Picture this:
If you start up the game in 1680x1050 resolution, but the title screen images take up, say 10% of the screen in each direction. That means the image is 168 x 105 pixels.
However, if we choose, say, 1024x768 resolution, to maintain the same-looking quality, the image needs to be 102x76 pixels.
This would mean we would need to make individual 2d images for each possible resolution, without even knowing what all the possible resolutions are (that depends on your monitor and your video card). The labour and hard drive space required, not to mention the amount of code I would need to switch out all the graphics depending on which of a billion different resolution choices was used, it's just not viable.
Right now what we're doing is just loading a single image and scaling it based on the resolution. I don't assume the player has any particular resolution, I just stretch the image to always take up x% of the screen width and y% of the screen height, so it looks the same no matter the resolution. The only difference is, at low resolutions, x and y are the same numbers but the number of pixels of the images is smaller.
10% of 1680 = 168 pixels
10% of 1024 = 102 pixels, hence the lower quality. The only fix would be to make individual graphics for each resolution, so we don't ever have to stretch images, but this is not practical because the number of images would get out of control.
As for the text quality, Again, the font size is based on the resolution.
In 800x600, I have to use, say 10 point font, which has very little detail.
To achieve the same physical size of text in 1680x1050 resolution, we can go up to closer to 18 point font, which is much more detailed, hence it looks sharper when shown on the screen. If we use 18-point font for the better detail in 800x600, the text is too big and won't fit in the space we need it. Again, there is no fix for that.
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If you dont' want to read all this, start reading here
What resolution (quality) do we choose for the title screen? Every computer, monitor and video card has its own "ideal" resolution. Also, now since that title screen is 3d, running it in a higher resolution than your computer can nicely handle will cause the game to lag BIG TIME on the title screen, which would just be a pain.
Basically, what quality do we choose for the title screen, if not the same one we use for the rest of the game? That's the logic I used.
