Any way to change the font?

Talk about the mods you'd like to see in Daggerfall Unity. Give mod creators some ideas!
User avatar
Nystul
Posts: 1501
Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2015 8:31 am

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by Nystul »

this is truly amazing! just WOW!

User avatar
pango
Posts: 3347
Joined: Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:14 pm
Location: France
Contact:

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by pango »

Definitely easier on the eyes, I like it very much!
Mastodon: @pango@fosstodon.org
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
-- Charles Goodhart

User avatar
Arctus
Posts: 60
Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2015 12:28 am

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by Arctus »

Damn, it looks great!

Al-Khwarizmi
Posts: 177
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 9:52 am

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

It does look amazing!

It would also be interesting to try a font color different from yellow. One got used to it from playing classic (in fact, I don't think I even gave this a thought when I played classic, I was too busy having my mind blown by the game, I guess) but actually using yellow as the primary text color on light brown parchment backgrounds seems like a really odd choice by the devs, doesn't it? Both from an aesthetic and from an usability point of view, it doesn't make much sense. (on darker backgrounds like the dialog interface, it does work better, of course).

In fact, parchments with black texts like these from the install dialogs look better to me than the typical in-game yellow texts:

https://78.media.tumblr.com/ed2222514e3 ... o1_500.png

User avatar
Interkarma
Posts: 7236
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by Interkarma »

I agree it's a weird choice of colour, I've often wondered about that as well. Currently the colour is hard-coded in DagUI system, but it wouldn't be hard to open up for change through settings and/or mods.

User avatar
Interkarma
Posts: 7236
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by Interkarma »

I've finished up SDF font support for now and this will be enabled by default in next round of builds. While playing, you can use Shift+F11 to swap between font rendering paths at any time.

Not sure if I'm going to keep this enabled by default in the long run. I'll decide based on general sentiment and feedback once it goes live.

The new fonts really do look good and feel like they fit perfectly in game. Text is all in the same place and has the same formatting everywhere. Just the text has higher density the more pixels user has available. Text looks amazing at 4K resolution now. :)

User avatar
TheLacus
Posts: 1305
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2016 6:22 pm

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by TheLacus »

Interkarma wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 12:24 am I agree it's a weird choice of colour, I've often wondered about that as well. Currently the colour is hard-coded in DagUI system, but it wouldn't be hard to open up for change through settings and/or mods.
What do you think of a single json file that provides a theme? It wouldn't require programming knowledge to write one and also avoids adding an high number of specific settings to the ini file, but rather allows to install a theme just by downloading such file. Something like this:

Code: Select all

{
	"Name": "example theme",
	"Labels": {
		"Title": {
			"Font": "example",
			"Style": "bold",
			"Color": "#dc3958"
		}
	}
}
The general idea is that the json file provides access to exposed global settings for UI (what is not handled by individual windows) and it can be expanded over time as needed.

User avatar
Interkarma
Posts: 7236
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by Interkarma »

I like this idea a lot, TheLacus. :)

Currently my SDF font system can't do italic, bold, etc. for style changes. It's still just an atlas mapped to ASCII codes and drawn as glyphs as per classic, albeit with rendering improved to look a nicer and use less texture memory.

I'm still kicking around ways to integrate new font system in Unity 2018.2 so we have a lot more flexibility and better text support, but it doesn't play well with DagUI. I've found some partial solutions for this already, but found it was easier to build SDF support directly into my UI system than trying to marry the two. Long term, I think it's best just to allow for alternate UI window replacement support than to keep building new features into the classic UI setup.

I'm just about done with fonts for now. It's still not where I like it to be, but I'm happy with the work done and how it fits in so neatly overall with the overall UI. It's a nice upgrade despite being a part-measure.

User avatar
TheLacus
Posts: 1305
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2016 6:22 pm

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by TheLacus »

I see, i know you put a lot of work in the UI System and now with smooth fonts it looks even better on high resolution screens :)

I gave a quick try to the json theme, with a default file in resources and a modified one in persistentdata folder that gets deserialized on top. Seems a fast and safe way to provide some customization waiting for a real UI modding support. I think a realistic aim is to expose the standard colors for controls such as checkboxes and sliders, which are set in DaggerfallUI and used in main menu and other new windows, while texture replacement should already offer enough control over original Daggerfall windows for now.

I noticed there are some colors in DaggerfallUI which are for specific windows, as you can see in this test file i made. I think it would actually be doable to expose the font settings of other windows this way if you like the idea, otherwise these fields can just be moved to their own classes like all other windows.

User avatar
Interkarma
Posts: 7236
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: Any way to change the font?

Post by Interkarma »

Cheers. :) The UI has been a struggle from the start. I wanted to perfectly emulate the look of classic's UI by default, right down to the pixel, while allowing for certain improvements (e.g. use player's actual resolution for better scaling on items in inventory). There's a lot of other little quirks I had to deal with as well, such as reproducing palette shifts and custom paper doll masking.

When I began, Unity's native UI system was still in beta and it simply wasn't capable of producing the results I wanted. Even now, I feel that DagUI is better at reproducing classic Daggerfall's interface than any other UI solution could be - probably not surprising as it was purpose built for that. But the downside is we lose out on a lot of modern options, and translators are still trapped with font atlases and writing nonsense ASCII text for languages like Cyrillic to map character back to atlas index.

I'll keep trying to refine things, but I don't think there's a silver bullet solution for bringing together the classic UI and modern flexible text solutions. The classic UI is just too monolithic and hard-boiled. There are too many assumptions made in quest text, text RSC, books, etc. that pretty much require user to have certain glyph widths on a 320x200 display. I've only been able to move past that by using some careful scaling and mapping between screen pixel area and classic pixel area so as to make the most of whatever pixels are available without changing the fundamental UI layout. It's been a journey to say the least.

Anyway, on to your test! I think that looks like a smart way to allow users to change text properties. If you decide to tackle this, please don't make too much work for yourself. I know how easy it is to dive down these rabbit holes. :)

I'm mostly happy with the new font system for now and I think end users will be too, even if they can't change styles or colours for a while.

Post Reply