[FFVIII] Working on a font replacer

[CaffeinatedKing]

So I'm working on a new replacement for the font/text within the game.

I'm using a japanese font identical to the Japanese PC release of FF8, which had been redone and now looks much better and also cleaner than what is available for our version, so I wanted to copy that as closely as possible for the most pure experience with a slightly more modern look.

However after I got it working through Tonberry, I've run into a problem, in game it shows up all jagged and messed up, despite the fact it's a 1024x1024 texture and is perfectly smooth and tidy when viewed outside of the game, am I missing something here or is there some limitation that is unavoidable or what's the the deal here? Surely there's a way to fix how text displays.



Any information would be much appreciated.

[Mcindus]

You can't use feathered Images - just anti-aliased ones.  In my release for SeeD Reborn, I replaced all of the fonts and ran into the same problem.  So, if your edges 'soften' and go partially transparent at the edges (feathering) then you would be having the problem you see.  This happened on some of my font shadows even when i tried to prevent it, so remember - Tonberry is very picky when it comes to transparencies... it uses the game default, which is 0% or 100% unless accompanied by an alpha channel (which I think might have to be a seperate file created for just this purpose, but I'm not sure.)

Also - don't expect the text to be 100% true to your image because the game stretches things to fit when it calls on textures.  The cards in my Triple Triad upscale mod Tripod suffer from this problem ultimately because Tonberry is limited to 4x resolutions.  If it was 2048x2048 the pixels wouldn't be visible on an HD monitor, but that isn't the case.

[CaffeinatedKing]

Well most texture stretching can be fixed by squashing it into the right dimensions in the first place, so that the game stretches it back out to look accurate, this is a pretty common occurrence for older games.
But I don't know what you mean by feathered VS Anti-aliased, as all the edges of the letters and even the shadow effect are a solid color with simple Anti-aliasing, not feathering.

I wonder how I could get Tonberry to acknowledge an alpha channel or if it would support a TGA format or something, because there has got to be a way around this, I refuse to believe after all these years we still know so little about how this game's inner workings operate, some of the text boxes in the game are semi transparent, so it's just a matter of figuring out how to get it acknowledge the edges of things properly.

[Covarr]

I think what he meant was that you can get an anti-aliasing effect through supersampling to an extent, making the textures as big as possible, but there can't be any antialiasing around edges in the texture itself.

[Aavock]

How does the text looks in dialogues? Because unlike FFVII, FFVIII uses only 1 font texture for both menus and dialogues. Dialogue font is displayed keeping the original aspect ratio; on the other hand, the font texture in the menu is horizontally shrinked (nearest neighbor interpolation) which leads jagged textures (like in your screen capture).

[CaffeinatedKing]

As far as I could tell, the Dialogue lined up pretty nicely it looked fine but didn't look any smoother or better than the menu stuff, I'm going to keep working on this over time until it's about as perfect as it can be because I really like how the Japanese redone version looks, I wish I could get a hold of the font file from the Japanese PC release to see how exactly they managed to do it.