[Fixed] Red text and untranslated text differences

Carnevil · Post by **Carnevil** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:54 am

It seems that two colors which are supposed to be the same in Doom are actually coming out differently. In the code, you can specify to draw text as "untranslated", meaning it just uses the exact text graphics located in doom2.wad, or wherever without translating them at all, or red, which means that it takes the font, and actually turns it red. Now, you would expect the red and untranslated text in Doom to appear to be the same, since Doom's untranslated text is already red. However, it appears to be actually brighter. I remember in earlier versions of ZDoom this was not the case (I could go dig up which one it started doing this in if anyone really cares). It's pretty annoying because the two kind of clash, and it's pretty hard/annoying at times to always use untranslated for Doom, and then red for everything else.

Anyway, I've posted a screenshot demonstrating this. Hope you can fix this Randy. Thanks!

HotWax · Post by **HotWax** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 2:37 am

How is this a bug?

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 2:45 am

This is an unavoidable side effect of how ZDoom handles fonts but most certainly NOT a bug!

Carnevil · Post by **Carnevil** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 1:52 am

Graf Zahl wrote:This is an unavoidable side effect of how ZDoom handles fonts but most certainly NOT a bug!

Unavoidable? How come this didn't happen in earlier versions of ZDoom, where Randy had basically the same font system?

If the red font in Doom is warped, I would certainly consider that to be a bug.

HotWax · Post by **HotWax** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 3:17 am

You asked ZDoom to color the font red, and it did so. How is this an issue? Use untranslated if you like the color better.

Post by **Chris** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 4:46 am

What about another shade then: dark red? it's kinda odd that you can have a red font, ask for red, and not get the right shade.

AFADoomer · Post by **AFADoomer** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 7:23 am

This actually make more sense, logically...

The thing that I've always wondered is why there's no way to make a font colored black.

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 7:39 am

ZDoom uses the exact same color ranges defined by Boom and added one more (yellow with black outline as in Hexen) Boom just never defined others.

A little technical explanation what's going on here:

To handle this universally ZDoom decolorizes every font it uses to grayscale and then re-colorizes it to match the desired color. This allows using every font you can think of in each color no matter how it is designed. It's just that the 'red' font Doom uses gets altered by these algorithms. I don't think this is worth a fix.

Post by **Enjay** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 8:23 am

AFADoomer wrote:The thing that I've always wondered is why there's no way to make a font colored black.

This was asked about before. My suggestion was that to make a font truly black, you'd actually lose what the letters were. Look at the doom font. The letters are not the shape of real letters. That dark, one pixel border around them would just make most letters a black, oddly shaped box if they were to be trasnlated to pure black.

A dark grey could be done. Otherwise, make a new font, colour it black and call it in a script as untranslated.

Post by **randi** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 10:41 am

Graf Zahl wrote:This is an unavoidable side effect of how ZDoom handles fonts but most certainly NOT a bug!

Carnevil's point is that the red used to be indistinguishable from untranslated and now they're not, so it should certainly be fixable. This probably happened because I had a bug in the color picker when I was designing the color ranges, and now the color picker has been fixed but the color ranges were left unaltered.

Risen · Post by **Risen** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 10:49 am

I would like to see this changednot because I think it is necessary or a bugbut because I like the red colors of the Doom font better than the reds on the translation, so other translated things would look better.

If you are going to change them, Please also consider adjusting grey and/or white so they are not so similar.

Post by **Xaser** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 8:19 pm

About the Black font, would something like this work?

Post by **Kate** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:55 pm

That looks more like gray than black...

Hey, maybe gray should look like that instead of a duplicate of white.

BouncyTEM · Post by **BouncyTEM** » Thu Apr 22, 2004 1:56 pm

Destroyer wrote:That looks more like gray than black...

Hey, maybe gray should look like that instead of a duplicate of white.

I agree to that. How can you use that specific font, though? [NOT the small font, the big one which they used for the difficultys.]

AFADoomer · Post by **AFADoomer** » Thu Apr 22, 2004 2:03 pm

Enjay wrote:
AFADoomer wrote:The thing that I've always wondered is why there's no way to make a font colored black.
This was asked about before. My suggestion was that to make a font truly black, you'd actually lose what the letters were. Look at the doom font. The letters are not the shape of real letters. That dark, one pixel border around them would just make most letters a black, oddly shaped box if they were to be trasnlated to pure black.

A dark grey could be done. Otherwise, make a new font, colour it black and call it in a script as untranslated.

What if you wanted a solid black font, though? I made a simple, unshaded font that was a light gray (the shade of which is not doable via the built in translations). It would be nice to be able to make this font black in game without having to make another font file... but it's not that big of a deal.