Arcade Font Engine Updates

(Administrator) 2009-05-05, 21:49 #16

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In reply to post ID 1681

German magazine GEE recently mentioned the fontmaker:

[Image: http://nfggames.com/games/fontmaker/GermanMagT.jpg]

Thanks to elend for the photo.

Quote by GEE:
Die "arcade font engine" gibt eingetippte Wörter in mehr als 100 verschiedenen Zeichensätzen alter Automatenspiele aus. So kann man Einladungskarten für Retro-Spieleabende basteln oder seinen Namen in der Typo des Lieblingsspiels von früher schreiben. Das Beste sind jedoch die liebevollen und fachmännischen Erklärungen zu jedem Font, der Farbgebung und seinen Besonderheiten.

Quote by Google Translation:
The "arcade font engine" words are typed in more than 100 different character sets from the old machine games. How can invitation cards for retro games evenings tinkering or his name in the typography of the game from an early favorite to write. The best, however, are the loving and expert explanations of each font, the color and its special features.

[Image: http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/special.php/b-d/bp-5/y-kof97/z-10/x-What?/.png]

This post was edited on 2009-05-05, 22:00 by NFG.

(Administrator) 2009-06-08, 23:42 #17

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In reply to post ID 1681

One new font:

(Administrator) 2009-06-22, 16:50 #18

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Added ~~three~~ ~~five~~ eight new fonts:

That's the alien-looking font from Taito's Bubble Memories.

And two more from the same game. Sadly the non-alien 8x8 font is just the regular arcade font everyone uses, so I didn't bother.

Finally, worked out support for large fonts in a way that doesn't break the font machine, and re-added two Alien vs Predator fonts:

As always, you can download the code if this sort of thing excites you as much as it does me. =D

This post was edited on 2009-06-22, 17:09 by NFG.

2009-08-09, 06:00 #19

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Hi,

I came upon this website through some other font search. I noticed that those large fonts are neither in the online demo or the download package. I am curious if they will be added?....

Sorry if I posted in the wrong thread...

This post was edited on 2009-08-10, 20:26 by jch02140.

(Administrator) 2009-08-11, 19:49 #20

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Good question!

I've updated the fontmaker archive to include all the large fonts. They still aren't available in the fontmaker.

(Administrator) 2009-08-13, 21:40 #21

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Added one new font:

This font from CAVE is like their [Image: http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/arcade.php/y-ddp/z-9/x-DoDonPachi]

font, with shading that's the same no matter which letter is being shown. The game itself includes 3 character sizes in addition to this one (8x8 and 16x16). The 8x8 is identical to DoDonPachi so I didn't bother ripping it, and the 16x16 is divided into four pieces, which just seemed like too much work to me.

(Administrator) 2009-08-15, 00:36 #22

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Added one new font:

This is a beautiful font, with real attention to detail from Cave. It's unique in this, as most of the time they use a stencil with a repeated fill. This does however seem to be a rendered or scanned font with the sometimes weird colour/pixel placement that would suggest. When you look real closely, as I did when I assembled it from the 8x8 tile matrix, you start to see weird things that you wouldn't really think were done by a human, but instead were the result of a machine reducing the size or colour depth of the image.

I still love it though, it's nicely anti-aliased and, as a brush-style font, it's quite unusual for an arcade game.

Despite what I said in the previous post, I am currently working on the 16x16 ESP.ra.de font, and the 16x16 Guwange font. What a massive pain in the ass these are. Here's a WIP image from the ESPrade font:

[Image: http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/fontstory/ESPrade-WIP.png]

Each letter is divided into four pieces, on the horizontal row. The red markings are my navigation marks, indicating the bottom-left corner of each letter. Following that are the top-left, bottom-right, and finally top-right. Each letter has to be reassembled from these four tiles, and there's so many letters that it's an annoying amount of work, but not so much that it'd really benefit from any kind of script or macro.

Ah, the things I do ~~for you guys~~ because I love these damned fonts...

This post was edited 2 times, last on 2009-08-15, 00:47 by NFG.

(Administrator) 2009-08-15, 19:43 #23

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Added two new fonts:

The ESPrade font is really a bit underwhelming, IMO. At 16x16 you'd really expect that Cave could pull out all the stops, with anti-aliasing and enough style to blow your mind. Instead, it's actually quite ugly.

Guwange on the other hand really looks sweet. I dunno what they used as a source, it's pretty obviously scaled down via machine, with curious pixel placements and more similar colours than you'd expect if it were hand drawn, but... Wow. Very smooth, very nice brush-stroke font.

(Administrator) 2009-08-16, 23:05 #24

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Added three new fonts tonight:

(Administrator) 2009-08-18, 16:02 #25

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~~Three~~ ~~Four~~ Five new fonts today:

Update:

This post was edited 3 times, last on 2009-08-18, 21:49 by NFG.

(Administrator) 2010-01-30, 23:57 #26

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Two new fonts added tonight:

I don't know how I missed this one for so long. It's a really great italic brush-type font from the otherwise incapable pixel artists at ADK. At first I thought they must have ripped it off some other game... It reminds me a bit of Samurai Showdown 3, but it's actually unique.

And that brings us back to Samurai Shodown 3, which has a fantastic 16x16 font that I somehow never got 'round to ripping:

Available in several lovely colours too!

[Image: http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/fontstory/samsho3b.png]

Samurai Shodown was a bit of effort to put together. Each 16 x 8 tile was divided in half, resulting in the jumbled mess below. It was a lot easier than Cave's method, where no two tiles were properly adjacent, but it was still a PITA to assemble the letters.

Once assembled though the different colours were easy, swapping colours from each sampled font into the already completed image.

[Image: http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/fontstory/samsho3a.png]

2010-02-22, 10:57 #27

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woop, postin' in dis place.

I'm going to have to roll the new codebase into my scenegen, it looks like - and I'm working on a new version for iphone-sized wallpapers. (also a test of my magic avatar!)

2010-03-12, 01:11 #28

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I am wonderingif the following would be something relevant/possible to implement

- Vertical font format (The image of the font is arranged vertically rather than horizontally)
- Bubble styles
- Use of pixel fonts
- Non-latin characters
- Pixel font effects (if implementable)
- Plugin/API for implementation to other pixel engine (spirite avatar/comic strips/etc)

(Administrator) 2010-03-12, 07:38 #29

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JCH02140: Well, it's a PHP script. All of these things are possible.

1. Vertical is easy, and requires just a re-jiggering of the hori and vert logic during image creation.
2. Bubbles styles also: create the different images and add a new switch to select them.
3. Um... What?
4. These fonts are taken from arcade games. You could draw your own fonts, and add them to the system, but it's WAY outside the scope of this project.
5. Like what?
6. It's trivially easy to use this script with others. Like this one.

I may do 1 and 2, if I get the urge. I don't understand 5. 6 is up to you.

I have no idea what you were thinking with 3.

(Administrator) 2010-03-19, 14:03 #30

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Added a new font today, thanks to neko for hacking it out of PS2 RType Final:

This is sort of an interesting, and sad, case. Modern games, with all their horsepower and storage and gee-whizmos means designers no longer have to rely on hand-crafted pixel fonts. Even when they do eschew a fancy scalable vector font, they often just pre-render them and shove the single-purpose ugly little thing into the game. It's fast, it looks fine, so why not?

Unfortunately it usually means several things:

Ugly aliasing. This RType Final font had half a dozen shades of black randomly stuck to the letter edges.

Single colours. Unlike Mame's palette data, storing multiple colour options for each font, modern games have no standard palette to explore. And with 16 million colours to apply in-game, why have palettes at all?

Strange formats. Who knows where in the game, and in what format the data will be found?

So yeah, lots of modern games may have bitmap fonts hidden inside, but the search for them is rarely well rewarded.

Thanks to neko for digging this one out.