[HUD] Font Facelift

[Vista]

Amazing. Well, why another thread? It's a HUD facelift afterall

[Mats391]

The big problem with HD HUD is that it would be big texture with mostly nothing on it. A better approach for that might be to have smaller parts of the HUD and combine them in code. That way you have less dead space on the textures.
That would really be quite a task to do, so lets focus on fonts first

[TBob]

Made an updated chat font



Also from some additional testing if there isn't at least 2 pixels of spacing between the glyphs then some artifacts can bleed over, at least when you're using the BF2 outline rendering



The outline renderer also does weird things when the glyph has single pixel wide lines



The to avoid this I just used a thicker font. Alternatively you can just disable the in-game outline rendering and generate the font itself with the outline. This does end up using more texture space though.

The big problem with HD HUD is that it would be big texture with mostly nothing on it. A better approach for that might be to have smaller parts of the HUD and combine them in code. That way you have less dead space on the textures.
That would really be quite a task to do, so lets focus on fonts first

True, though a number of HUDs are already split up that way and are still quite low resolution.

[TBob]

Updated the asset list font, I also found and fixed a bug in the original where the top of the red transport truck icon was cut off.



Also did squadlistfontlocal_8 which seems to only apply to these 4 words



It would probably be possible to just eliminate it and use the team name font instead.

I think I overestimated the texture sizes it would require, for example the new asset list font is 64Kb compared to the old one at 32Kb.

[mectus11]

I hope this happens in a future update, would be a nice change from the blurry text even if it's a small one.

[Mineral]

Yeah it's absolutely great but our only concern is memory. Many client crashes are down to hitting the 3GB memory limit that the engine gives us. So just adding more to it needs to be a well weighted decision. Same reason we have to downsize so many of our great weapon and vehicle textures even though we have much higher resolutions available

I personally do think though this needs to looked at more closely. It instantly makes the game look a little less dated.

[BigBang]

Those blurry fonts were something I never really realized until friday when I brought home my new PC and 27" monitor. So I have to say good job! And can't wait until it will be implemented

[TBob]

Did another pass on hudfontlocalbold_9 to get it into a finalized state




The new texture is 64KB compared to the original 16KB, however there are several other fonts that could be merged into this one without a significant change in the interface.

These have slightly wider character spacing in the originals but I don't think that has enough of an impact on the interface to warrant an additional texture
commrosefontlocalbold_9
dropdownfontlocalbold_9
helpmessagefontlocalbold_8
scoreboardfontlocal_8
squadlistfontlocal_8

As well as two fonts only used by the flash menu
standardtextbold_12
standardtextbold_13

I couldn't find any references to these in the menu files but these are also identical
commandersquadlistfontlocal_8
helpmessagefontlocalboldoutline_13

The new font is 64KB compared to the original at 16KB, but eliminating the duplicates could even result in a net reduction of texture space for this group of fonts.
I also found that the original fonts are using uncompressed textures - I assume to avoid artifacting (if you can think of a more likely reason please let me know). By using DXT5 I can increase the texture size much more efficiently and any artificating has much less of an impact.

I think I can bring my original estimate down to around 1MB of additional texture memory when you include removing unnecessary fonts.

[B4rr3l]

The big problem with HD HUD is that it would be big texture with mostly nothing on it. A better approach for that might be to have smaller parts of the HUD and combine them in code. That way you have less dead space on the textures.
That would really be quite a task to do, so lets focus on fonts first

That is what I did in the HD Remastered, you can take HD menu textures and codes for smaller everything in there when it's all uploaded

[B4rr3l]

Did another pass on hudfontlocalbold_9 to get it into a finalized state




The new texture is 64KB compared to the original 16KB, however there are several other fonts that could be merged into this one without a significant change in the interface.

These have slightly wider character spacing in the originals but I don't think that has enough of an impact on the interface to warrant an additional texture
commrosefontlocalbold_9
dropdownfontlocalbold_9
helpmessagefontlocalbold_8
scoreboardfontlocal_8
squadlistfontlocal_8

As well as two fonts only used by the flash menu
standardtextbold_12
standardtextbold_13

I couldn't find any references to these in the menu files but these are also identical
commandersquadlistfontlocal_8
helpmessagefontlocalboldoutline_13

The new font is 64KB compared to the original at 16KB, but eliminating the duplicates could even result in a net reduction of texture space for this group of fonts.
I also found that the original fonts are using uncompressed textures - I assume to avoid artifacting (if you can think of a more likely reason please let me know). By using DXT5 I can increase the texture size much more efficiently and any artificating has much less of an impact.

I think I can bring my original estimate down to around 1MB of additional texture memory when you include removing unnecessary fonts.

32 bits give you smoother shades, that usually helps in the alpha, in that case the font was really small so if it were compressed it will add a a lot of artifacts and look blurry, yes worse than it was already lol. Since you are doing them in a larger size with more pixels and font's don't have any particular alpha effect (at least solid colored fonts, you can make 3D Fonts and replace them in the DDS also, using the same spaces and alignment) You can easily use DXT3 or DXT5.

[TBob]

So at this point I've updated almost every font, the only real exceptions are the console font, the bottom right vehicle ammo count, and infantry magazine count numbers. I'm not entirely sure where the firing mode indicator is stored either. There are also a few fonts that I don't where they're used (if at all) that I didn't touch.

There may be some offsets and spacing that could use some tweaking here and there but this is in a mostly finalized state.
You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-YPi ... VVWYi1kSDA

Difference in texture size totals is about 1.5Mb, this could be optimized further by doing some character culling, the duplicate fixes I've mentioned, or some other manual tweaks here and there.

[Arab]

So at this point I've updated almost every font, the only real exceptions are the console font, the bottom right vehicle ammo count, and infantry magazine count numbers. I'm not entirely sure where the firing mode indicator is stored either. There are also a few fonts that I don't where they're used (if at all) that I didn't touch.

The firemode indicators and hud stuff are located in the menu/hud/texture/ingame/ folder somewhere. They also need to be compiled into one of the menuatlas.dds file (menuatlas1.dds iirc) if you modify them, else they won't work. The PRBuild.exe tool in our repository can generate those easily but that requires access to our repo etc. There are also some tutorials and tools to do these manually as well.

You could also just simply paste the font pictures over to the atlas and with some trial and error, manage to work it perfectly without it clipping

Not sure about the console font though.

[TBob]

The firemode indicators and hud stuff are located in the menu/hud/texture/ingame/ folder somewhere. They also need to be compiled into one of the menuatlas.dds file (menuatlas1.dds iirc) if you modify them, else they won't work. The PRBuild.exe tool in our repository can generate those easily but that requires access to our repo etc. There are also some tutorials and tools to do these manually as well.

You could also just simply paste the font pictures over to the atlas and with some trial and error, manage to work it perfectly without it clipping

Not sure about the console font though.

I did find the fire modes on atlas0 and menu/hud/texture/ingame/weapons/icons/hud/firerate but I'll probably leave those alone for now.

The console font I believe actually uses the old 1942 format which I haven't touched. I would have to rework my generation method if I could even do it at all. Personally I don't think it would be worth it.

[Arab]

ye consoles are not important

[B4rr3l]

I did find the fire modes on atlas0 and menu/hud/texture/ingame/weapons/icons/hud/firerate but I'll probably leave those alone for now.

The console font I believe actually uses the old 1942 format which I haven't touched. I would have to rework my generation method if I could even do it at all. Personally I don't think it would be worth it.

Don't you guys have the script for the bmfont? with that everything would be easier, you can mess with the font creator from 1942 and use its spacing and glyphs with the BMfont offset and DDS, but both generated fonts gotta be really close in size for that to work, I don't remember right now but gotta change more stuff in bmfont also. Anyway without the script It's fucked up method and you will probably always have some minor or large issue. Just use photoshop, with accurate grid lines and that becomes an easy task.

[TBob]

Updated the magazine and vehicle ammo numbers
Edited the OP with the most recent download and more recent screenshots.

Currently I've only done the English localization, I'd been waiting on confirmation that these are good for the finalized settings to use before generating other localisations. Languages using the standard extended Latin character set should be relatively quick to make since the settings can carry over. Some languages like Russian require a different font so may take longer. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean have a potentially prohibitively large number of glyphs.

Also I was wondering if there would be interest in including cyrillic charchaters (or potentially other things) in the vehicle hud font. I thought it might be neat to have the hud text read "3???8 HE" instead of the Romanized "3UOF8 HE".

To do any character culling I would need to know which characters are actually unwanted.

In the meantime I messed around with a redo of the main bluefor helicopter hud elements, featuring higher resolution but an overall reduction in texture usage. I also enhanced the responsiveness of variometer - previously maximum descent or ascent would only move it by a single tick mark. The right side bar I was testing using a high contrast design. The percent sign texture is replaced with a text node.

[B4rr3l]

Updated the magazine and vehicle ammo numbers
Edited the OP with the most recent download and more recent screenshots.

Currently I've only done the English localization, I'd been waiting on confirmation that these are good for the finalized settings to use before generating other localisations. Languages using the standard extended Latin character set should be relatively quick to make since the settings can carry over. Some languages like Russian require a different font so may take longer. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean have a potentially prohibitively large number of glyphs.

Also I was wondering if there would be interest in including cyrillic charchaters (or potentially other things) in the vehicle hud font. I thought it might be neat to have the hud text read "3???8 HE" instead of the Romanized "3UOF8 HE".

To do any character culling I would need to know which characters are actually unwanted.

In the meantime I messed around with a redo of the main bluefor helicopter hud elements, featuring higher resolution but an overall reduction in texture usage. I also enhanced the responsiveness of variometer - previously maximum descent or ascent would only move it by a single tick mark. The right side bar I was testing using a high contrast design. The percent sign texture is replaced with a text node.

Very good!

[cribbaaa]

Nice work! hopefully this will get implemented in the next version.

[Mr.VdHeide]

Good job, keep it up!!



D.J.

[projectmundus]

Very well done!