Ok, i loved the new fonts.. I know there are some issues with size and bold and they are easy to fix. One thing I wanted to say though was that I think it didnt have to be a radical change. For some areas the old font was GREAT and gave a flair of SCI-FI to VO that now is missing. I for example loved the old font here:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/manual/images/nav.universe.jpg

and in some other places. The font size for the sell menu is definitely a bit too large. More empty space around text increases the readability alot. What do you think?
:)

CharInfo needs a different font too.

You can't make everyone happy. LOL

see the other thread.
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/7612

another group saying the font needs to be changed.

:)

I did not love the old font, but I'm definitely not a big fan of the new font either. The old font had that futuristic feel to it which was nice to see, NOW, it's one of the most generic looking fonts. Yes, it's easier to read but YUCK!!!!! Is there a way to just make it adjustable on client side????

Right now, fonts are hardcoded into the engine, and from what I recall have to be individually rendered beforehand to work. A new font system utilizing system text libraries would fix this, but that's quite an undertaking, and requires yet another technology split between the different platforms' binaries.

Ok, scratch that idea then =) perhaps a poll from the devs on the choices that they like, let us make the final call by majority vote??? just a thought.

I'm definitely not set on the font that's in there now. I was just updating the rendering code to improve readability, and the old font went with it for now. It did look okay at certain sizes, but it was impossible to read at low resolutions and it looked dumb when it was big.

The old font code had many undesirable properties, and one of them was a very strange way of specifying how big the text was. If you wanted it to be about 15 pixels tall at 640x480, you'd set the font size to 32/480 because you had to include all the dead space under each letter, and the fonts were sized in screen space and not in pixels so it looks the same at all resolutions.

Unfortunately, since all of the interface used the weird sizing, getting the new font to be both sized correctly and look decent was a big pain and I still need to fix about a thousand things. It probably would have been better to save the font rendering change for whever we do a complete interface overhaul but I didn't know what I was getting myself into at first.

I still need to make a config option so you can try your own fonts.

Freetype2?

The fonts are rendered with freetype 2, yes, but they are pre-rendered onto a texture at several point sizes. All I need to do is make the converter script available and add a config option for font and then you can put your own fonts in. Ideally the interface would use a couple different typefaces (headings vs. normal text, etc) but fixing up the interface is going to be a massive undertaking.

I also need to make the rendering script let you specify different fonts for different sizes. I think that would be ideal, since any font with any element of style usually looks like crap under 14 points or so. And really small sizes are probably better off if they're rendered bold rather than one-pixel thin.

No offence to you devs, but the new font looks like it was selected by a programmer or engineer ;)

I never had a problem with the old font. Sure some text is easier to read, but the game has lost some character. You could use a slightly more edge type like Futura or Tachoma for the chat, char info, mission tabs etc and go back to the custom Vendetta mk 2 for the station tabs, HUD, nav-map etc.

Monaco. Looks beautiful at small sizes :)

BTW, a1k0n, any reason why you don't use FT2 to render the fonts on the fly? Seems like it'd be slower than prerendering to textures, I know, but with the texture switches that inevitably occur when using multiple fonts on screen, it actually ends up being a wash in most cases, and it's certainly less complex to just render on the fly :)

--mcn

i like the font.

I like the new font in the BUY menu, but nowhere else. I'm happy enough with things, though, because I want to see more important things happen(like the engines fixed, etc.)

I like the current font because I can read it. The old font was very hard to read with the HUD set to the smaller size.

I also thought the point, or at least one, of using Freetype is so that you don't have to worry about rendering the font from a bitmap.

The point of FreeType is so you don't have to figure out how to render vector fonts *into* a bitmap. FreeType does that for you, and then you turn around and use that bitmap for anything you wish (texture, printing, etc).

For example, in a little project I'm working on in my spare time, I have textured "dynamic text" quads--with each texture being dynamically loaded as the text updates. I simply call FT2 to render into the texture and then upload it to the gfx card. Extremely simple, good performance, and it lets you mix other bitmap effects in with the text (like mixing fonts/colors on the same bitmap, underlines, strikethroughs, filled backgrounds, inline bitmaps, etc.)

--mcn