Menu/gui Concepts (fonts)

[Springheel]

currently im doing the font styles and layouts needed... and i got the idea to make them lively when

a mouse over is in place.. should look real nice in the end.

 

This confuses me, since the loading screens don't have any interactive fonts. Are you talking about the actual game menus? We do have concepts for those as well, with fonts already chosen (and some ideas for animating them, similar to what you mentioned). What are you basing yours off of?

[pakmannen]

I think these are the fonts we're "using":

- Carleton

- J.D.

- Dark11 (or Mason?)

 

Other than that, should we start assembling a clock or what?

[drumple]

ok, im doing some text tests, and it is very hard to get proper looking text such as the fonts we decided upon

into the hud, due to the resizing of the textures doom3 does.. but this last test seems as close as to good

looking text that i can get so far. the main problem is that the text most of the time comes out looking blurred

and smudgy... but this one seems to be close to crisp, and the higher the resolution the more crisper it gets..

( ie.. it looks fantastic at 1024x768.. not so good at 640x480 )

 

this is just a test of the text, so don't start with "thats the wrong background.. " and so on.. its a placeholder..

actually.. you can critisize it.. as always, all critique's are welcome..

 

 

and the screenshot is an actual in-game shot and not made in paint shop pro or photoshop.. basicly, this is

more or less how doom shows it.. plus its a tga to jpg, so its not as crisp as it is in game.

 

what i have been trying to find, and with no luck so far.. is the mouse pointer shader or actual tga.. i was

thinking we can change it to something else.. maybe a broadhead arrowhead or something.. but thats up for

debate if i can ever find it.

[pakmannen]

I think Napalm already imported at least the Carleton font, and I don't remember any smudgyness, but that might be my memory failing. I think he also switched the mouse cursor. Might be a good idea to get in touch with him and see if still has these things.

[drumple]

This confuses me, since the loading screens don't have any interactive fonts. Are you talking about the actual game menus? We do have concepts for those as well, with fonts already chosen (and some ideas for animating them, similar to what you mentioned). What are you basing yours off of?

 

the fonts im using are the same fonts that were chosen, and thats what they are based off, but the actual fonts

do not look as good ingame as they do made in photoshop or other concept art, which is very crisp and clear.

you can take a concept image and put it in doom3 but it will not look as good as the original due to the way

doom3 resizes the image and the scale of 1.3 to 1 that it uses... thats all. you can come very close to it which

is what im trying, but i am using the 3 fonts that were decided upon for it.

 

for things like the shader effects the text will have to be images, like the doom3 logo. the ingame carelton

font can still be used, but in area's where effects are not needed, such as the key bindings and tooltips.. ect..

[pakmannen]

Yes, I know all that. Maybe you are not aware that we had another guy who worked on the GUIs before? Anyway, I was talking about things he had gotten ingame, nothing else.

[drumple]

Yes, I know all that. Maybe you are not aware that we had another guy who worked on the GUIs before? Anyway, I

 

was talking about things he had gotten ingame, nothing else.

 

yes, im fully aware of that, but i was asked to help on the menu gui system since he's been mia , the main

reason for this post was to display the quality's of the fonts in a different manner, and what im aiming for.

im not trying to make a huge change to the concept of the menu's, they will look more or less the same, it's

just that there is more info that needs to be displayed than the area that is given. they will look the same..

more or less. im suggesting that the settings page be sub menu'd, since all the settings information cannot

fit on one menu, and i was aiming to show how clear the text will look as opposed to the ingame fonts..

 

another example here ( without the heat/fire effects yet ) show's how crisp the text looks compared to the

ingame text which is displayed at the bottom in a tooltip once a menu item is mouse-over'd but not selected

yet.

 

 

plus the top header changes to reflect the mouse-over, and if this item is selected it goes to the page for

ajusting the visual components. items to select yes/no.. screen res.. the slider for screen brightness.. ect..

 

but in the end, the fonts are the same, carleton/dark, it just shows how clear and crisp they will appear ingame,

and they do look clear and crisp compared to the doom3 carelton fonts.

[pakmannen]

I'm not really sure what you're talking about, but what I wanted to say was basically:

 

- I think Napalm did import the Carleton font

- I think Napalm changed the mouse cursor

 

I don't remember the font being blurred when I looked at the GUI he sent me, but I might just be remembering it wrong. Anyway, I merely suggested trying to find his files and see if he perhaps managed to get the font ingame without making the text that blurry. And also to find out how he switched the cursor, since you seemed to want to know that.

 

they do look clear and crisp compared to the doom3 carelton fonts

I wasn't aware Doom already had the Carleton font?

 

Edit - I see your response 3 posts up was directed at Springheel, not me. Might be why things got confused.

[drumple]

i have the carelton font in doom3 already, thats all im saying pak.. when i made the classic hud mod, i

converted the fonts for doom3 for it, they are in that mod, but yeah.. the mouse pointer i would like to know

where it is.. but cvs hasnt worked for me, and the ftp just sits there until it times out after 10 minutes or so

of loading, but i will hunt the pk4's for it and see what can be done with it.. but that depends on if people

actually want it changed to something unique for the dark mod, and not the standard doom3 one.

 

but no worry's.. things always work out in the end..

[Springheel]

Yeah, we had decided we wanted an arrow-head of some kind for the mouse pointer.

 

D3 graphics will look blurry if they don't begin with dimensions as a factor of 2, but I don't know how that might apply to the fonts. I haven't heard of anyone else having that blurry font problem.

[Gildoran]

I put carleton, jd and treasuremap on CVS, though I'm not sure I did the best job with converting them to Doom 3. Feel free to reconvert them and change them around... AFAIK the only thing they're being used by currently is the readables testmap.

[Dram]

Yeah on low resolutions the font looks blurred. It looks really bad. But most people use 1024x768 or more anyways.

[drumple]

basicly thats what it comes down to is the resolution for better quality... it will look excellent the higher you go,

here is a screen at 1024x768 of the same gui and you can see how much sharper the text appears.

 

and i found the mouse pointer, its in a folder called UI, and not the in guis one.. which is good.. because there

isnt much in the UI one, and to have to wade through all the material listings or the guis folder to try and find

it would have been a major headache.

 

anyone good at making a broadhead pointer? or suggestions? its a 32x32 bitmap, i'll give it a shot. but it

doesnt have to be a arrowhead.. but maybe something that suits the style of the concepts for the hud in

general. i'll try a few things.

[Gildoran]

What about an quill pen?

[Domarius]

Yeah, we had decided we wanted an arrow-head of some kind for the mouse pointer.

 

D3 graphics will look blurry if they don't begin with dimensions as a factor of 2, but I don't know how that might apply to the fonts. I haven't heard of anyone else having that blurry font problem.

Don't know what's going on, just thought I'd input; all 3D hardware requires all textures to be a power of 2. Nowadays, rather than refusing a texture that isn't, a 3D engine will scale it up to the nearest power of 2 in each dimension (or add padding in other cases), hence the blurring.

 

Fonts are usually stored with every character on a single bitmap, but if D3 reads True Type fonts natively (sounds like it does, if you got Carelton in there?), then there will never be any bluring, since they are scaleable. But some TT fonts are better suited to smaller sizes than others. Arial is one. Carelton, being a fancy font with little serifs on the ends of the letters, is definetly not one of them.

 

Anyway that's all just FYI. I'd suggest for tiny letters probably going with a more pixel friendly font like Arial.

[drumple]

d3 does the fonts from bitmaps, the carleton fonts im using in d3 are ones i converted from ttf's. but your right

dom, the more fancier the font, the less quality d3 can display it as... but the font headers im making in psp

work nicely so far for clarity and crispness. overall im actually getting into the menu making, its coming along

nicely, slowly chopping up the main hud and hopefully will have a working menu up for download soon..

 

well.. not very soon, it will be a placeholder that will need some tweaking here and there, but it should replace

the d3 menu's altogether for now.

 

i managed to make a mouse pointer from the broadhead.lwo model that looks nice, i'll see if i can get that into

a working sample, but overall.. im really enjoying the experience of trudging through the menus.

[Domarius]

Ah you converted them yourself into bitmaps - nice work

[New Horizon]

Ah you converted them yourself into bitmaps - nice work

 

Yeah, there's a tool specifically for doing that in D3. I think it's called q3font, it's packaged with the Quake 4 SDK. Is that the tool you used drumple?

[Domarius]

Man, those guys thought of everything.

[Springheel]

Are we sure this quality issue is unavoidable? If so, how will it affect the fonts for our readables, since they are also GUIs?

[New Horizon]

Are we sure this quality issue is unavoidable? If so, how will it affect the fonts for our readables, since they are also GUIs?

 

Might the font look better if the font size is larger on the textures? I seem to recall that q3font breaks the fonts up into a series of 256 x 256 textures...the larger the font size, the more textures it uses to create them.

[drumple]

i don't beleive there will be any issue with the quality of fonts converted, the readables should look nice,

i just went with the option of making better looking header's for the menu's since i don't believe using the

converted fonts would do a better job.

 

better antialiased fonts and such look better as headers when an external program suh as photoshop or psp

does them, but thats just for the menu header's and sub-header's. using the other converted fonts for on the

fly readable's should be without any problems.

 

@NH, i believe it was q3font i used.. im not shure.. i tried a few different ones, one wouldn't make the fonts

at all ( if they were to fancy ) or it would just convert a few ttf's. but fonts like JD should work out fine since

that particular font lends itself to clarity ( for the readables ).

 

but again, it comes down to how much quality a person wants to see, if you play at the low 640x480, it

obviously will not look as clear and excellent that the 1024x768 will offer, but thats not just fonts, thats the

whole game as a whole. more jaggies.. ect.. i personally play at 800x600 but thats a good compromise for me.

 

the menu backgrounds im making at 1024x1024 which should work out fine for every resolution. the Roq vid's

at 512x512, and the menu header's at 128x32 for clearer text and even larger for the main menu header's.

 

the side's of the menu where the dark brown parchment is will have some movement feel towards it, im not

shure how it was decided for that, but different images transitioning to other ones plus a nice ambient

sound track will really make the menu's come alive.

 

i'll come up with a working concept/template that ppl can actually try in game and then over time, the issue's

with it can be discussed and the menu's tweaked until a final product is reached.

[drumple]

on a similar topic, i need to request some space in the english.lang file, i see that #str_10000 and above is

being used for things, so if anyone is not considering using #str_08000 to about #str_08050, i'll use those for

now. although technically i guess we could use any non system string in that file that doom3 uses for its

maps for gameplay.

[drumple]

i guess i should post an update on the main menus, im still adding in all the text headers for all the menus

which takes some time since they are multilayered and there's so many, but its coming along. im aiming to

present a menu with no fire/flame effects 1st since it's easier and if looks and works like ppl have concieved

then adding in the other razzle dazzle can be done overtime before the final version of the darkmod comes out.

 

i managed to take a screenshot of the broadhead arrow in milkshape and resized it to make a mouse pointer..

but the wierd part is it wont show up in game. the pointer sits in /ui/assets folder, and i thought if i made one

for the darkmod ( darkmod/ui/assets ) and plopped it in there it should use it.. but it doesnt. i found out there

is also a duplicate .dds one in the pk4's, so i made one of those also and added it, but it still doesnt show.

 

im starting to think that the pointer is coded into the sdk to directly get the one in base/ui/assets... its just

a guess but other than that i do not see why it wont display it.

 

 

it actually looks pretty good.. just wont go in at the moment.

[pakmannen]

i guess i should post an update on the main menus, im still adding in all the text headers for all the menus

which takes some time since they are multilayered and there's so many, but its coming along. im aiming to

present a menu with no fire/flame effects 1st since it's easier and if looks and works like ppl have concieved

then adding in the other razzle dazzle can be done overtime before the final version of the darkmod comes out.

All the concepts for the main menus aren't done yet, and none have been created in high-res.. Just so you know! As long as you code everything so that images can be easily replaced everything should be cool.

 

I wasn't gonna start transfering the main menus to high-res until we had sorted out the startup thing, but is that finished now or what? What remains to be done?