console font + cyrillic = rectangles

[pvdk]

Well I've tried to get the original Morrowind fonts working with MyGUI a couple of times, and the result was rather poor.
The bitmaps are of a very poor quality to begin with, and I never got MyGUI to display them correctly. Now there is a Better Dialog Font available for Morrowind, which looks slightly better. But since it uses the original font format it doesn't scale well to modern-day resolutions.

Apart from that, the bitmaps are different for every locale, and need to be extracted from the .fnt file and converted to a proper image format before OpenMW can use them. Now, since we can't ship Bethesda's content for obvious reasons, this needs to be done at runtime, making it even more of a hassle.

So the original fonts is not an option. I hear you ask: Why not use a readily available Morrowind-like font, like Planewalker? This won't work either, as the fonts that are available don't support all the character sets we need to support with OpenMW. (Trust me, I've searched)

Long story short, as much as I would like to see the original Morrowind font in OpenMW, it's not that easy.

However, there is an upside to this story though. I've contacted the author of the font we currently use, EB Garamond. Now, don't get your hopes up just yet, but he said he might be able to make us a Morrowind font with support for all the characters we need, based on the original font but open-source.

DejaVuLGCSansMono.ttf works good. Should I add it instead of VeraMono and make a pull request?

Good idea, but also update the following:

• credits.txt: Remove the Bitstream Vera section and replace it with text appropriate text for DejaVu Sans.
  Bitstream Vera License.txt: Remove this and replace it with the licensing terms for DejaVu Sans.
  openmw_font.xml: Replace the font here too of course.

[pvdk]

...so a converter could be written. Are the bitmap fonts in mw low res enough that this would be pointless?

Peppe wrote us a program which does just that: it converts the .fnt file to a .xml with all the offset coordinates for every glyph and a .png with the actual bitmap. If you're interested I could dig it up, but yeah, the quality of those fonts is pretty low.

[HiPhish]

I may be missing something, but why on earth would we wnt the original bitmap font back? Bitmap fonts scale awfully and become blurry, vanilla Morrowind was unplayable for me until I replaced the font. it might have looked good in 2002 with the low resolutions at that time, but in a game where there is much to read we should look for the most comfortable solution. EB Garamond looks very nice and it resembles the original font enough. And since it's a vector-based font the engine could allow upscaling text for people who are further away from their screens or who have bad eye sight.

[cdoublejj]

I've seen a few artist post offering help for the project, perhaps an artist could use photo shop or something re do the font btimaps in higher res.

[Tarius]

I've seen a few artist post offering help for the project, perhaps an artist could use photo shop or something re do the font btimaps in higher res.

This is certainly possible if you find someone willing.

[Zedd]

I've seen a few artist post offering help for the project, perhaps an artist could use photo shop or something re do the font btimaps in higher res.

This is certainly possible if you find someone willing.

We had some grapical artists, but I think they aren't around anymore.
Except for Okulo maybe

[pvdk]

I got a mail from the author of EB Garamond, he said he planned on starting with the Morrowind font around June/July of this year. Until then we can continue using his other font.

I've seen a few artist post offering help for the project, perhaps an artist could use photo shop or something re do the font btimaps in higher res.

Those are already available as Morrowind mods, but using bitmap fonts in OpenMW is a bad idea for the reasons I've given before. Also, when our font guy gets around making us a custom vector font, there is no need for those font bitmaps anymore.

[cdoublejj]

well it doesn't have to be bitmaps but, someone earlyer in the read said or mentioned something along the lines "are the bitmaps from with in the font available or editable" I assumed it at least is based on an image file.