Font

[bxxl]

It is my second time playing U7, and I still feel the font somewhat hard to read. Are there other options for the font?
Thanks.

[draadje]

Its funny because it never seemed to bother me back when I used to play U7 a long time ago, but now when I try to read the text its like constantly attempting to read from a magic-eye illusion. So in other words, I know what you mean, and I do beleive there are some people(on these forums even) attempting to implement some smoother fonts, but I don't think anything is released as of yet. But I'm wrong a lot so you should probably ignore me.

[Dominus]

It would be nice to have the Pentagram font replacement code ported over to Exult

[drcode]

Does Pentagram use bitmap fonts like U7, or does it read font files?

[SB-X]

Pentagram uses TTF right? And I thought Artaxerxes made a new Exult font.

[wjp]

Pentagram can use both U8's bitmap fonts and TTF.

Doxygen documentation for Pentagram's Font and FontManager classes:

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... 1Font.html

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... nager.html

[artaxerxes]

it was just for fun and took a lot of time. IIRC, you can import a ttf font in Exult Studio. Just save it as the main font (#0) and launch Exult. The game should now use the new font.

Artaxerxes

[bxxl]

My observations for "font import" in Exult-Studio:
(I import the font file Arial.ttf in Windows 2000)

(1) Font color makes differece.

When some color (such as #250) is chosen, the color of pop-up text changes several times.
For example,
(text show up in orange)->(yellow)->(white)->(text disappear).

But some colors do not cause such behavior.

(2) The char 32(the space character) is very long. And it causes
a very large line-to-line spacing. I need to fix it manually by GIMP.


Besides, some chars in U7 are different from ASCII, such as
char 64 and 127.

[bxxl]

The original font actually has three parts. The char body is represented
by several colors, all are yellow but differ by brightness. There seems to
be 3~5 kinds of brightness. It is for anti-alias. The font also has
black shadow and transparent background.

IMHO, both are needed: anti-alias for smoother chars, and black shadow
to make text more distinguishable from background.

[drcode]

Yes, you want to avoid the high colors, since they're used for palette animation. Note that one of the fonts used in the Spellbook does use one of these.

[WalterMß]

I recall to have had some problems back in 1992 to adapt myself to Ultima 7 BG's conversation fonts (and to its mild Middle English too, since I was a 14-yo boy at that time), but I really got used to it, and never forgot.

I love Exult's conversion and wouldn't be willing to play Ultima 7 in any other fonts (I don't even use any smoothing/rendering engine, just to feel the "look" of the original 320x200x256 MCGA graphics).

By the way guys... I have a question on Ultima7 dynamical palette engine.... but I'm gonna post it in a more appropriate topic.

[eaterofspleens]

I agree, that font makes me feel stoned attempting to read it. Keep it...

[gruck]

"Yes, you want to avoid the high colors, since they're used for palette animation."

Ohh baby we could have font that constantly changed colour! Just the perfect thing to bleed our eyeballs out of their sockets!

[WalterMß]

I guess it would be possible for spellbook's spell names and illuminations, or objects' names popping up whenever an item is single-clicked on and its name apprears in-game (with the yellow medieval large font), but not in conversation mode, since the cycling palette of "magic-related" colours is stopped in the meantime.

In fact, some characters' portraits (especially in Serpent Isle) do use such colours (for magic necklaces/earrings, magical auræ, or fire backgrounds, such as Ssithnos' or the Phoenix's portraits), but they're actually "freezed" for the aforementioned reason.