Font Scaling Issues [updated]

[aedwards00]

Hey, I'm pretty much a complete beginner with AGS, but I've watched some of the video tutorials and have some scripting experience, and have now started experimenting with simple rooms etc.

Having been a big fan of Monkey Island games I decided to download the "9-verb MI style" template from this forum, and that all seems to be working fine so far, but I'm having an issue with the scaling of the fonts. The template uses a one font for the main text and another as a border. Both are TTF.

Essentially, I have chosen to make a game in 640x400 resolution, and the gui and everything seems to have scaled up fine, but when a character speaks, the font outline no longer seems to line up with the inside section of the text. I've hunted around on the forum for a solution and have tried the following:

- Enabling "Fonts designed for 640x480": This fixes the problem, but now the text appears much too small.
- Re-importing the fonts at a larger size (14pt instead of 10pt) to try and solve the new size issue: This strangely brings back the original problem.
- Enabling "Anti-alias TTF fonts": This seems to have little or no effect.
- Using automatic outlining instead of an outline font: This does work, but the outline is too thin for my liking.

I am not worried about the text appearing blocky or pixellated (aliased i think), I just want to be able to have the fonts at a decent size, along with the outline displaying correctly.

If anyone can give me a (hopefully simple) solution to this i would be extremely grateful.

Oh and I am using AGS v3.1.2 SP1, on vista SP2.

[aedwards00]

Hmm, well I've figured out what the problem is...

When the game scales the 2 fonts, for whatever reason it doesn't do an especially good job, and the inside ends up smaller than the outline, which causes them to line up wrong. I'm still not really sure why i can't just import them at a larger size and disable the autoscaling.

Does anyone have any bright ideas on how i can manually edit the font to fix the problem? I've tried radiant font edit but it doesn't like the TTF file, and I also can't seem to get anywhere with softy, which i've seen mentioned in another thread.



EDIT:
A new related issue - I've started recreating the 2 fonts manually in radiant font edit, just a few characters at first to test them, but I've gotten some strange results. The fonts seem to import fine, and preview correctly, but in-game only the top 1/2 or 1/3 roughly of each character is displayed. Does anyone have a suggestion why this is happening? I dont wanna spend ages remaking the remaining characters if they're not gonna work properly.

And one quick question on the font editor, should all characters be the same height with empty space where its not used? or can they simply be smaller?

thanks