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calref / cboe

Classic Blades of Exile
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Free/Libre replacement fonts. #228

Closed clort81 closed 1 year ago

clort81 commented 4 years ago

My research into the fonts used for openboe indicate they seem to be restricted by copyright.

To help avoid any possible issues going forward, I am developing replacements for bold, plain and maidenworld TTF fonts.

While the current TTF fonts are rendered by SFML to a close approximation to the original, the antialiasing causes a 'style clash' from a UI design perspective. Some people are more sensitive to such things than others:

BoE-ClortFont IF your browser scales the image, you will not see the proper 1:1 bitmapped view - click on image and save it to view at 1:1. (And yes, the character names need to be moved up 1 or 2 px)

SFML fails to add an extra pixel of space when 'bolding' the font, but maybe this is something i overlooked in font creation - an extra pixel can be added with

str_to_draw.setLetterSpacing(2.0); //Clort test a wider kerning

in "gfx/render_text.cpp" 94 (right after options.style.applyTo(str_to_draw), but this widens all fonts. It would need to only add a pixel space for the bold font, if we choose to adopt it, or add it as an option.

It requires a point size of 11px, so references to BOLD font with 10 or 12px need to be changed to 11.

clortfont

My replacement fonts are freely redistributable under the BSD license.

clort81 commented 4 years ago

CLICK ON THE PICTURES FOR FULL SCALE VIEW The kerning issue with SFML bold fonts seems to occur with other bdf fonts (those which load at all) as well: fonts-sfml_kerning

ClortFont-11 kerns fine when bolding is off (see console at lower right): fonts-clortconsole

ClortFont-11 for 'plain' font is closer to original WinDOS BoE font. Whether it's preferable to openboe's existing 'plain.ttf' is probably a matter of personal taste. I'd be happy with either.

(addendum: scalable .ttf will always look better at non-integer scaling factors, i.e. not 1.000 or 2.000)

clort81 commented 4 years ago

I've finished a 20-point replacement bitmap font for 'MaidenWord'. It consists of 100% hand drawn glyphs by me, Clort. Currently available as .pcx and .bdf under BSD license. clortdamsel1 1b

ClortDamsel v1.1 is available here https://laclin.com/clort.html

I have not finished patching OBoE to use the bitmap font, but a friend helped me convert it to TTF, which SFML can scale to the various sizes the game currently demands. clortdamsel_boe_ttf

The results with scaled ClortDamsel TTF are not better than MaidenWord, but at least we now have license-unencumbered fonts for the game. I will continue work until results look good.

ClortDamsel now 1.2 - many consistency and kerning fixes: OldCoderCDsample

CelticMinstrel commented 1 year ago

I'm closing this since the posted fonts no longer seem to be available, and issue #317 now tracks the underlying questions of aliasing and whether we're even allowed to use the fonts we're using.