Better fonts in speech style?

[spook1]

I am making a game with many dialogs.
Comments from the players of the pilot game are that the text is:
- hard to read
-font is nice but often not clear against the background
-it is not clear who is talking to whom.

I have the dialog options diaplyed in a GUI at the bottom of my swcreen and the text of the oehter characters is displayed on the screen

Can anyone suggest a really neat way of displaying the dialog texts in a very clear way; that is: also clear to people a who are not used to gaming?

Maybe something with text balloons is possible? Or a really neat font exists which can be easily placed near the head of the talking character?

[Khris]

A screenshot would help tremendously...

[SSH]

Download the fonts on the resources page and see which you like best...

[spook1]

I have downloaded my own font, but with outlines this font's characters become real thick blurs.

To illustrate the problem with my font I put two screengrabs online on:

www.xs4all.nl/~koops/spacespy/ex1.pcx
and
www.xs4all.nl/~koops/spacespy/ex2.pcx

I am not too familiar with all different types of solutions.
maybe a background, or white speech balloons exist?

Or is there a way to make the outline work??

regards,

Martijn

[Kweepa]

What is wrong with the automatic outlining? Another screenshot would help.
Just crop the image to the text and post it as a medium quality jpg, rather than uploading full 500k pcxs.

[seaduck]

IMO you should use a little larger font, and most importantly a thicker one. You definitely need an outline or background. Automatic outlining works, but it's only 1 pixel wide AFAIK. If you want a thicker/refined outlines, a big help is that some paint programs can do outlines automatically (like Autodesk Animator).

As for choosing a font, the 2 fonts considered the most readable of them all are Times New Roman (for printed text and high resolution) and Arial (for low, screen resolution). You might try the bold or black variants, if your characters are too thin. Decorational and non-standard fonts are always less readable.

Also, high-quality, hinted outline fonts (such as Times and Arial bundled with Windows) or hand-rastered fonts are preferable. (Vs. most free decorative TrueType fonts available on the net, mostly unhinted, their poor quality of rendering is very visible on the screen).

[spook1]

Thanks a lot.

I found out that the text looks OK when I use automatic outline, expet when the outline (black) is the same color as the text-color.

EG: When I start the game I have a typeline function, which just calls font number 1, and the text is displayed in black as well. Then the characters become thick and blurry.

Is there a way to change the color of the text? In e.g. a display() function??

P.S. Can I download the TimesRoman and Arial fonts in some easy way??

[seaduck]

Ooops, we have a little problem here,

Times New Roman and Arial are shipped with every copy of windows, typically in the c:windowsfonts   imes.ttf and arial.ttf

You could technically include them directly into your AGS game, but...
The problem: These are copyrighted (more exactly: they contain copyrighted hinting programs, outlines are generally free to distribute)
(and also it's technically less favourable, because it's slower)

My original idea was to take these fonts, rasterize them - and create raster fonts in SCI format.
Of course this takes some work (unless you have a specialised tool)... and a SCI font editor. Unfortunately I don't know of any, and the link in AGS manual is broken.

A description of the font format is here http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/x2345.html but I don't suppose you want to take the pain of making your own conversion tool.

Do you know this page?
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/scifonts.htm
These fonts are ready to download and use... some of them might work for you.


I myself don't feel like making an end-user font conversion/editing tool, because that's too much work. Nut if there is interest, I could make myself an ad-hoc tool and contribute some rasterizations (eventually some hand-rastered or customized low-res fonts, if I'm in a good mood).

[Kweepa]

Times New Roman and Arial are shipped with every copy of windows, typically in the c:\windows\fonts\times.ttf and arial.ttf

To import them into AGS, you may need to copy them out of that directory first, since the file browser works differently for the Fonts folder.

You could technically include them directly into your AGS game, but...
The problem: These are copyrighted (more exactly: they contain copyrighted hinting programs, outlines are generally free to distribute)
(and also it's technically less favourable, because it's slower)

Umm, when you import a TTF, AGS rasterises it for you. So there's no copyright problem, and no speed difference. There may be a quality difference but that's another issue.

Is there a way to change the color of the text? In e.g. a display() function??

The text colour is specified in the Characters "tab" in AGS under "Talking colour". See the manual for more info.

This should probably be in beginners tech questions.

[spook1]

Thanks for the comforting answer considering the copyright question.

The text color setting question was about the display() function.
I have solved it with a Typeline function I found, where I can also set the color of the text.

Thanks a lot for helping!!