Following is a technical primer to help understand the font layout process and why some fonts will look better than others.Įvery book, text resource, quest, and popup in Daggerfall uses hardcoded formatting similar to old-school teletext where formatting bytes are injected into a signal later parsed by a decoder and formatted on-the-fly at the same time signal is being read. This isn’t as easy at it might sound due to how fonts work in classic Daggerfall itself. The first step in creating a new font for Daggerfall Unity is to select a good font. If you do use a different toolchain, the only thing that matters is the output image is a proper SDF texture and the glyphs are laid out in a specific way. This is just the process I’m using that will generate known-good output for Daggerfall Unity. You can use whatever font or tools you like to generate your SDF font atlas. TES Font Pack (we’ll be using Morris Roman Black font from this pack as an example).SDF Texture Generator Free (Unity asset for creating SDF textures).Codehead’s Bitmap Font Generator (for creating initial texture atlas).Unity 2018.2.11 (we’ll be using a free Unity asset to generate our final SDF texture). There are a few resources you will need to work through this tutorial. This tutorial doesn’t look very deeply at SDF concepts, only the process of creating new SDF fonts for Daggerfall Unity. If you’re interested in the inner workings of Signed Distance Fields, there are loads of great resources out on the web. Unlike regular pixel fonts that become quite pixelated at high resolutions, SDF text can use those distance values to generate sharp detail even at UHD resolutions and beyond. Rather than storing individual display pixels of a text glpyh, SDF fonts store a distance value that can be turned into display pixels later at any resolution using a custom graphics shader. This enabled smooth high-resolution font replacements which can operate under the same “layout rules” as classic Daggerfall’s pixel fonts, with a substantial improvement to reading comfort as this comparison screenshot demonstrates. All the way back in September, I upgraded font rendering in Daggerfall Unity to support Signed Distance Field (SDF) fonts.
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