37 replies to this topic

[Aeviannce]

Will this be good for BWP installation? If so, what part of the installation will this be on?

[Delfosse]

Sure. You can install it last. If you install it somewhere in the middle, I think some mods can biff fonts (don't know which mod does that, but it happened to me in the past) and then you won't be able to uninstall this mod, but if that isn't a concern for you then the order of installation doesn't matter at all.

[The Imp]

I think some mods can biff fonts (don't know which mod does that, but it happened to me in the past) and then you won't be able to uninstall this mod, but if that isn't a concern for you then the order of installation doesn't matter at all.

That was when the mods biffed the files the old style directly from the override directory to the data folder's one .bif file, that's not a nuisance anymore as the BWS actually tries to remove all that and makes the Generalized Biffing to do all the heavy lifting(which in turn can very well be uninstalled). Besides the mods that used to biff the files are at the very top of the BWS install order, aka TDD, SoS, BGT, NEJ... so.

[Almateria]

So uh. Those fonts look pretty bad, actually? The dialog box reply fonts are just tiring to look at and not legible, no matter which size, the floating text is also illegible on a mixed background, item desc has those weird long spaces and line breaks, and tooltips are somehow cut off.

 

The dialog box text is okay though.

[Delfosse]

>The dialog box reply fonts are just tiring to look at and not legible, no matter which size

Oh? Did you try the weidu version? If so, could you try the non-weidu version pls?

 

 

>the floating text is also illegible on a mixed background, item desc has those weird long spaces and line breaks, and tooltips are somehow cut off

If anything is different from the images in the first post with the non-weidu version, could I ask you to show a screenshot please?

Edited by Delfosse, 05 July 2014 - 10:22 PM.

[Delfosse]

@ljbo

 

Um, is there a reason the weidu version installs "normal.bam" as "norma1.bam"?

 

I just tried your version and the game simply doesn't load norma1.bam to use as font. I then tried manually renaming norma1.bam to normal.bam and the game crashes, saying something about the .chu file. So I removed the .chu file from the .tp2 and I also renamed norma1 to normal. Now everything seems to work, it just copies the three files in the override folder.

 

What was Ghostdog's hack supposed to do anyway? Why did he want the game to load the bam file with a custom name? Also, it talks about normal1.bam in the comment section, but trying that name didn't help either - the game was still crashing. 

 

@Almateria

Could you try the new version? The old weidu version didn't work for me either, but this one does.

Edited by Delfosse, 07 July 2014 - 07:12 AM.

[Delfosse]

Was unsatisfied with a few things.

 

1) In item description, the space between words and between lines was too big. Reduced it. Would've reduced the space between lines even further, but the engine doesn't allow it.

 

2) Floating text was some unrelated font. Now it's almost like vanilla, but bigger.

Left image: original. Right image: modded.

 

 

Reuploaded the files in the first post.

Edited by Delfosse, 09 August 2024 - 01:42 AM.

[Delfosse]

Trent Oster finally answered and as it turns out they are indeed using home-built tools. So with that, the hope of custom BGEE fonts is dead in the water I guess.

[The Imp]

Trent Oster finally answered and as it turns out they are indeed using home-built tools. So with that, the hope of custom BGEE fonts is dead in the water I guess.

Unless you ask them to release that tool, without a tutorial...

[The Imp]

could you add the letter û (for french ppl)? it appears as a square in game.

The fonts files need to be language specific... if you could upload the (French )original, it would help to make the French font.

[Delfosse]

French language would require not just one, but a dozen glyphs - éèêëçàâîôùûœ, etc. You could borrow the glyphs from basic letters and then manually draw the accents (except for œ, which would require some more effort). I could describe to you the pipeline if you're interested (would take you a few hours to do the whole thing, more or less).

 

On a side note, I've actually had the misfortune of playing the french version and it's just execrable - the voices, the translation, everything... it's better to avoid it if you can and play with a dictionary.

Edited by Delfosse, 31 July 2014 - 12:10 AM.

[Delfosse]

Hey. Some Japanese contributor made a tool to convert fonts into BGEE format.

 

http://forum.baldurs...-tool-bgfnt-exe

 

Since it's all in Japanese, I'll leave you a short guide in English that I figured out through google translate.

 

1) Download and install BMFont: v1.13 (358KB)

2) Extract NORMAL.FNT and NORMAL.BMP from the game files. You can extract BMPs with WinBiff from data/fonts.bif and then extract FNTs with NearInfinity.

3) Download the Japanese BGEE Font Tool and unzip it: https://dl.dropboxus...ool_ver.1.2.zip

4) Place the NORMAL.fnt and NORMAL.BMP into the same folder with the tool. Then run through console: bgfnt -e NORMAL.fnt char.txt

5) A text file "char.txt" will appear. You will need it later. Now open the BMFont program.

6) Go into Options -> Font Settings. Use these settings:

 

Font: <your desired font>
Charset: Unicode
Size: <your desired size>
Render from TrueType
outline: CHECK
TrueType hinting: CHECK
Font smoothing: CHECK
Super sampling: CHECK
level: 2
Outline thickness: 0

Now go into Options -> Export Options:

 

Padding: 0 for all
Spacing: 1 for all
Texture: width: 1024 height: 1024
Bit depth: 32
Channel Value: "glyph" for all. Inverted is not checked.
Font descriptor: XML
Textures: png
Compression: Deflate

 

 

Now click Edit -> Clear all chars in font

And then Edit -> Select chars from file -- and now you open that "char.txt"

 

Now Options -> Save bitmap font as and save it under any name, let's say "test.fnt"

 

7) Now take "test.fnt" and "test_0.png" that the program generated and place them into the BGEE Font Tool folder.

8) Delete "normal.fnt" and "normal.png" from that folder. Then run: bgfnt -c normal.fnt test.fnt

9) The program will generate "normal.fnt" and "normal.bmp" files. Place them into the game's "override" folder (create one if necessary).

 

DONE!

 

I only tried it with Arial so far, and it worked. I'm going to try it with my fonts now and update the first post if everything is in order.

Edited by Delfosse, 16 September 2014 - 11:32 PM.

[Delfosse]

Upon further inspection, I found out that using this method produces font files, in which letters are a little bit jumpy. Some glyphs are 1 pixels higher than they should be, or 1 pixel too far to the left, etc. It's less visible with some fonts, more visible with others (definetly more visible with my font, but less so with Arial... basically the thinner the font, the less there's problems with it)

 

I don't know whether this is the result of Beamdog's work, BMFont's or BGFNT's. Either way, some program works a little bit not as expected. The solution would be to take the font you're interested in and slightly alter the glyphs, for example to take the "i" glyph and move it 1 pixel down, etc.

 

I'll see about doing it some time this week, I think.

[The Imp]

@Delfosse, the current code:

BEGIN ~16 px~
SUBCOMPONENT ~Bigger fonts? If so, choose size.~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/16px/normal.bam~ ~override/normal.bam~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/16px/floattxt.bam~ ~override/floattxt.bam~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/16px/toolfont.bam~ ~override/toolfont.bam~

BEGIN ~18 px~
SUBCOMPONENT ~Bigger fonts? If so, choose size.~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/18px/normal.bam~ ~override/normal.bam~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/18px/toolfont.bam~ ~override/toolfont.bam~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/18px/toolfont.bam~ ~override/toolfont.bam~

BEGIN ~20 px~
SUBCOMPONENT ~Bigger fonts? If so, choose size.~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/20px/normal.bam~ ~override/normal.bam~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/20px/toolfont.bam~ ~override/toolfont.bam~
COPY ~Delfosse-Fonts/20px/toolfont.bam~ ~override/toolfont.bam~

Seems odd as the existing floattxt.bam is not moved at all in the 18px and 20px ! But the toolfont.bam is twice in the two later cases ... what's up with that ?!?
Also I look at a few very old instructions and there's a reference to the stonsml.bam file, which seems to be a normal.bam font file just renamed, but your mod doesn't have it. It might have been that Ghostdog's mod used a special code(Font_chu_patch.tph) that makes the GUI use the normal.bam instead of the stonsml.bam, so multiple of mods installed together would result in different output than each one as a single handily. The reason I noticed this all is that as your picture has 4 pictures for 4 references, but no file names... (dialog box, tooltip, item description and float text.) ... so you probably should have 4 .bam files probably.

[Delfosse]

Seems odd as the existing floattxt.bam is not moved at all in the 18px and 20px ! But the toolfont.bam is twice in the two later cases ... what's up with that ?!?

 

Oh, indeed, thank you. It was ljbo who did the Weidu version of this, I barely touched it and I guess neither of us tested the 18 and 20 pixel versions.

Reuploaded the correct version now.

 

Also I look at a few very old instructions and there's a reference to the stonsml.bam file, which seems to be a normal.bam font file just renamed, but your mod doesn't have it. It might have been that Ghostdog's mod used a special code(Font_chu_patch.tph) that makes the GUI use the normal.bam instead of the stonsml.bam, so multiple of mods installed together would result in different output than each one as a single handily.

 

Yeah, I don't know what was up with that Ghostdog's patch. I guess ljbo just copied his code. This mod isn't supposed to make any changes to the GUI, so I removed the patch and all references to it.

 

As for the 4 pictures, Tooltips and Item Descriptions use the same font file, hence only 3 files.