Fonts

[Napalm]

I'm doing some work on the Menus and Books, and right now I'm using template placement fonts. At some point though we'll need to use our own. I had a program to make font converters for D3 but i seemed to have lost it (gotta find another copy), But before I do that, do any of the artists have any fonts, that we might want to use, or should I just convert some of the common ones from some free site?

[Springheel]

We're going to want to use the classic Thief fonts for the most part. There's no copyright problems there is there?

 

I can give you all the fonts for the menus. And all the graphics too, for that matter. I've assumed that you're using placehold graphics for the buttons and stuff up until now. Just let me know what format you'd like them in.

[Napalm]

I'm using placeholders but if you have everything now there is no reason not to use it. I don't know if the classic fonts hold copyrights or not, I'de assume any texture copyrights on the original game would hold for the font. Even if there isn't copyrights the font will still be redone for D3. If you gimme the font I'll recreate it in higher res, and the menu graphics can just be placed on CVS under guis/assets/menu

[Springheel]

I'll upload the fonts and the menu graphics (in PS format) to the FTP site at some point today.

[Napalm]

Only leave then in PS if theres stuff I'll need to edit, otherwise just place them in .tga

[Springheel]

I can put them in TGA, but how do you want them separated? Do you want the whole thing as one big graphic? The buttons need to be separated, don't they?

[Napalm]

Anything that wil be interactive or have scroll over functions (Buttons scroll bars ect) should be seperate, anything that will be changing on a per menu basis (possibly backgrounds) will also be seperate. In fact just leave everything but buttons in .tga

[Springheel]

Ok...I'm a little worried about the semi-transparent part, as I've had trouble with alpha channels and .tgas before. But I should be able to get the rest to you in working order either tonight or tomorrow. I'll include the fonts as well.

[Springheel]

I've uploaded the file, called menumain.rar, to TheDarkMod/Files/ on the ftp site. It has all the Thief fonts and all the graphics for the main menu. All of the images should be scaled properly for D3 (powers of two). Hopefully the alpha channels worked--let me know if things don't look right.

 

If there's anything else you need, just let me know. I can upload the option menu too, just let me know when you're ready for it.

 

edit: oh, one thing I didn't do was add a mouseover effect to the buttons...I was going to add a small 'outer glow' layer effect. You can go ahead and do that in PS if you think it's worth adding.

[Springheel]

Did you get these ok? Is the transparency working properly?

[Napalm]

Sorry, I was away for the weekend, I'll download everything tommorow morning, the transparency should work fine in .tga though, I've never had any problems...we'll see int he morning I can add the mouseover glow layer quickly thats fine.

[Napalm]

Alright I downloaded everything so now i have all the seperate parts, I'll start setting up the menu, however how do we want the setup, whats the final result sposed to look like?

[Springheel]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by setup. Just do the main menu to start. http://www.mindplaces.com/save/menumain1.jpg

Unless someone comes up with something better, it will look like that. For now, use the D3 city picture in the file I gave you for the background, though it will change later.

 

I'm pretty sure I included the mouse pointer, but let me know if I didn't. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions.

[Napalm]

Hey can I get a couple resolution types of people to check out the main menu (no buttons should work so don't give that as a problem). D3 gui resolutions are messy so I wanna make sure there are no problems. I would be alot farther along but I want to fix the base before I keep working. Adding the rest of the menu is easy, but I want to make sure quality will work right before I go on.

[Springheel]

I'll look at it. Where is it?

[Napalm]

I gota upload it to ftp, but i wanna fix one thing

Ill tel yea when I do

[Napalm]

Im playing around with the buttons I'll put it up sometime tommorow

[Napalm]

It's ok I checked it on all resolutions, it will work fine, the problem is Doom 3 guis max at 640x480 resolution so its seems a little blurry (not to bad, just not crystal clear) I'm hunting for how they made their menus so nice but I think it might be the fact that it's al video and they used scanlines to make it look better. Anyways I need some extra graphics a "Are you sure you want to quit?" "yes" "no" and then the other menus as well.

[Springheel]

it will work fine, the problem is Doom 3 guis max at 640x480 resolution so its seems a little blurry (not to bad, just not crystal clear)

 

Actually this isn't true. I ran into the same misconception when I played around with readable books last year. Here are some of the things I learned about D3 resolution:

 

The same applies to DOOM 3. Instead of seeing it as 640x480, see it as 100%x100%. If you use 320, you're using 50% - it will take half of the screen. And this is no matter which resolution the user has... if he's playing at some insane 1600x1200 resolution, hey, it'll still take half of the screen with a 800 width.

 

Don't worry about it. Don't think about it. 640x480 as a reference is just fine - it's exactly the same as 1x1, 100x100, 1280x960, 4x3. It doesn't matter. What matters is the size you create your images in, and the size you put your image in the screen.

 

If you have bad images, you're doing it WRONG. Simple as that. If you do a drawing-based image with a 640x480 size in mind and then bang your resolution to 1600x1200, it'll naturally look squashed out. This is more than normal and doesn't have absolutelly anything to do with the 640x480 coordinate system. If you want some image to look crisp in every crazy resolution people use, just create some super-detailed image and then use it at 50% of its scale (for example) on the gui script. It'll interpolate down when it's to be displayed at 640x480, but at 1280x960 you'd have a 1:1 image and as much detail as you want.

 

Just to be clear, the 640x480 coordinate system is not a limitation and it doesn't affect the final image quality in any way.

 

 

Think of the GUI size as aspect ratio as opposed to a resolution. Instead of 640x480 it's more like 640:480.

 

An aspect ratio of 640:480 is equivalent to 4:3. And most screen resolutions are also at an aspect ratio of 4:3.

 

So, let's say you want to make a GUI with a background image that's 1024x768.

 

Draw your image at 1024x768 in whatever program you use and then scale it up to the appropriate power of 2 resolution, in this case 1024x1024.

 

Now, let's write a material shader for the image...

 

Code:

big_bg {

  {

      blend      blend

      map      textures/guis/big_bg.tga

  }

}

 

 

But we're not done. Since your image meets, if not exceeds a resolution of 1024x1024 it's likely to be compressed by the game (depending on quality settings) in order to save texture memory. The problem is that this is going to reduce the quality of the image.

 

We can fix this by adding the material shader commands forceHighQuality and nopicmip to the material shader like so...

 

Code:

big_bg {

  {

      forceHighQuality

      nopicmip

      blend      blend

      map      textures/guis/big_bg.tga

  }

}

 

 

Now it's just a matter of applying this image in our gui and in this case the image is just a background image so we can apply it to the desktop windowDef.

 

So, you create your new gui, select the desktop windowDef, open the properties, and assign "big_bg" as the material.

 

That's it. That's all that's required.

 

Because the aspect ratio of the gui is 4:3 the square image will get squished down vertially to fit and it will look just as good as the original image did in Photoshop or whatever.

 

The short of it is--there's no reason why the GUI should look blurry at all.

[Napalm]

Maybe it's just my eyes....You take a look at it and see what you think, truthfully it could just be me, or some minor issue with the gui setup, anyways I'll put it up on the ftp in the base form just to check it out, I just don't like the way it looks, and it bugs me cause I dunno if it's something wrong with my code or if I just don't like it :-p. Anyways nothing should work cept mouseover and quit button

[Napalm]

K it's up on FTP under mis-el-a-nee-us menu2.zip, you'll have to put all the files in the correct places, also make sure to put the .tga's in, I had to tweak some alpha channels and they're named differently then before

[Springheel]

That doesn't help me too much...where exactly do the files have to go?

[Napalm]

lol, just put the gui in guis and the assests in /guis/assets/mainmenu/things....sorry I'm not really thinking to well... (on IRC, if were gonna keep forum talking) when you boot up mod it will come up as mainmenu.

[Springheel]

Ok, a few things I notice (my monitor is at 1024x1260, and I run D3 at 768x1024).

 

The background picture is definitely low-res and blurry. That's not a huge problem, since it's just a placeholder, but it doesn't have to be that way.

 

The actual menu itself doesn't look right either. The biggest problem is that it looks gamma-blasted. It is very bright. The transparent black looks grey and the font colours are messed up because of it. I can't tell whether the menu graphics are crisp because the colours are too distorted. Any idea what might be causing that?

 

I also think the dimensions of the menu are skewed a little bit...it looks like it's been stretched heightwise, though I'd have to double-check.

 

edit: Ok, I've posted two pictures for comparison. The first is the original, the second is a screenshot of the menu as it appears on my monitor. You can clearly see the difference in gamma for the menu. The menu area itself (and the text) seems a little larger than the original, which might cause it to be a little blurry, if it's been stretched.

 

 

 

 

 

Also, I notice the menu is still using the default mouse-pointer. Not a big deal, but is it difficult to add the custom one?

 

The 'frobbing' of the text works and looks good.

 

Btw, what would it take to add an ambient loop to the main menu? I'd love to add one of our sound files to the menu--I think it will really make the whole thing that much more impressive.

 

I'll start working on the next batch of graphics for you.

[Napalm]

gimme an ambient and I'de be happy to add it, thats one of the things I wanted I was playing around with menu, and the stretching is due to the weird size of it (the menu is actually squashed to 328-315) (i think something weird like that) this causes the size to be warped. I'll play around with it so it looks right, that was just something I caught playing with buttons, but forgot to fix. As for the faded look its not the text its the alpha on the backgroundsquare, If I take it off the text looks fine...I'm not sure what to do about that it's an alpha channel problem not the script since it was even worse looking before (I turned it down slightly in the end) I think that if we use a square the same size ingame with a transparency it might work better then the alpha