Page 1 of 1

Improved Strife’s BIGFONT file

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2019 1:58 am
by Kostov
https://github.com/coelckers/gzdoom/pull/721

Original

Image

New

Image

The current sbigfont.lmp file for Strife has a couple of problems that I’ve spent some time fixing. I was forced to reverse engineer it through a process described here because no application that I’ve tried (ImageTool and DoomCrap) have been able to convert it to an editable format.

Problems with the old file:
  • The letter W is created from scratch instead of being taken from the game’s own graphical assets, which is strange. The creator must’ve missed it when first making the bigfont file.
  • The number 9 and letter Y (letters J and Y are the only letters not to appear in Strife’s graphic assets) are affected by some strange pixel artifacting at the very bottom that goes outside of Strife’s color palette. Not really noticeable ingame, but strange nonetheless.
    • When reverse engineering, I had to edit the palette of the original .pcx file to accomodate these artifacts. If you want to edit a .pcx file that is accurate to Strife’s palette, the fixed version below provides that.
  • The digit 0 looks identical to the letter O. To differentiate between the two, I’ve made the former a bit thinner.
The new file also reduces the width of spaces from 7px to 5px. This wasn’t intentional, but in the game’s assets, the spaces between words are inconsistent and vary from 5px to 12px. (Might as well save some screen space!)

Original (.pcx)
New (.pcx)

Ingame preview (original)
Ingame preview (new)

(If whoever hosts ImageTool is reading this: it’d be great if you could put one of the two .pcx files in the imagetool.zip download so that people have the possibility of editing the Strife BIGFONT file. Original if this pull request gets turned down, new if it gets accepted. Also this.)