Rollercoaster Tycoon 1+2 font

[mrpenguinb]

Fonts

Do the fonts in OpenRCT2 need to be higher resolution? Preferably yes.
Having higher resolution fonts can improve legibility, in 3D mode it should fit aesthetically.

Trebuchet MS is the most accurate font I can find to match RCT's. RCT has the font at an odd resolution, as many of the lowercase letters lose their defining features (e.g. lowercase "i" not having a notch on the left, similar effect on "t").

The` key details of the font don't match completely, but it could be assumed that RCT has the font size so low that the details get crushed (e.g. lowercase "t", "y" and numbers).

• Lowercase "y" that has a straight-angled (no hook) - Detail crushed?
• Lowercase "t" that has a minimal horizontal line end to the left of the vertical line - Matches
• Lowercase "l" that has hooks to distinguish between lowercase and uppercase - Matches
• Numbers should appear similar when at low resolutions. More distinct curves and hooks appear when the font is at higher resolutions (I don't know a way to test that this is true) - Detail crushed?

Discrepancies: Uppercase "M" and "$" (replace these particular characters with Tahoma ones?)

Compare with the images below:

I am almost certain that the game uses Trebuchet MS.
Trebuchet MS is also included in Windows by default.

[duncanspumpkin]

Do note we have modified some of the characters already such as lower case l.

We could do with a whole new font for the game probably and make it so that latin languages render the same way as the none Latin languages. But at this time no one has really decided.

[mrpenguinb]

Do note we have modified some of the characters already such as lower case l.

We could do with a whole new font for the game probably and make it so that latin languages render the same way as the none Latin languages. But at this time no one has really decided.

The game might use Tahoma then, since it matches with almost every character.
Yeah, it might be worth making a completely custom font based on what it looks like in OpenRCT2 currently.
Or else editing Tahoma by modifing the lower case l and other characters might be a good option.

[keiyakins]

Don't use a system font and assume it's there because "it ships with Windows". There are Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and Android builds, and the potential for others - similar projects have seen ports to everything from DOS to Haiku to the Nintendo 3DS. If you want a specific font, you must ship it yourself.

[zrowny]

(Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. I'm talking out of my butt a little bit here, since I'm not really familiar with font rendering, especially in the context of games)

Deciding to switch away from a pixel "font" is definitely not trivial or obvious. If we switched to an actual vector font, that would presumably take a decent amount of programming work to switch from rendering sprites for each character to an actual font renderer. I think the non-antialiased look is really important (I hope we never go the direction RCT Classic does its UI), so it would have to do that, and that makes font hinting really important, which is a-whole-nother can of worms if you want any control over the actual pixels in the font.

TL;DR, having multiple sizes of fonts is hard. If you use vectors (like most modern fonts) it's easier to scale, but it's a lot harder to control exactly how it looks at a pixel level. I think a better solution is to just create multiple sets of sprites for different font sizes. I don't think we really would need more than 1x and 2x for this anyway.

As far as shipping the font, there's plenty of open source fonts (including versions of Tahoma) that we wouldn't have a problem including if we went that route. If we stick to bitmaps obviously we'd be distributing those anyway.

[Ryder17z]

I don't think we really would need more than 1x and 2x for this anyway.

how would that affect non-integer scaling?
i.e. I use 1.5 on my laptop because both 1x and 2x are practically unusable on it.

[zrowny]

how would that affect non-integer scaling?
i.e. I use 1.5 on my laptop because both 1x and 2x are practically unusable on it.

Just to get it out of the way, I don't know that it would make sense to actually make 1.5x (or any other non-integer) sized sprites, for fonts or for anything else.

I assume that render scaling essentially works now by rendering the game to a smaller resolution and then scaling it up (with nearest-neighbor interpolation). I have only a limited understanding of how the rendering engine works, but even just having 2x sprites would have to involve a significant change to this, to scale all the 1x stuff and then render the 2x sizes separately. For non-integer scaling you could render at 1x and scale up (what we already have) or, if you're okay with the effects of downsampling, 2x and scale down?

[Ryder17z]

ideally you would render in high res and scale down, but with a good upscaler the opposite is better

[oli414]

I think the pixel-art font is part of the charm at the moment. Obviously, for some characters and languages, it doesn't quite work but it looks like alternatives have already been added for that.

I think that it might be fine to keep the current font, at this resolution pixel art fonts get incredibly similar. If we do design our own font we should probably stick to the same characteristics in terms of the non-uniform width, sans-serif, and roundness.

I've done a lot of pixel art including fonts so I could give this a shot. I know someone has made "CoasterSans" but I'm personally not a fan as it is a lot lower resolution.

For the eventual higher resolution graphics pack I think it's okay to just have a different font. Trying to find/make a font that works in pixel-art, and high resolutions isn't really feasible.

[Ryder17z]

a blocky "LCD"/"Digital" font might work. Example:

(this particular font is under CC0 license)

[zrowny]

I think that it might be fine to keep the current font, at this resolution pixel art fonts get incredibly similar.

I'm not a lawyer etc etc, but we're definitely legally fine with re-using the font. IP laws on fonts are kind of interesting, since they usually differentiate between the typeface, which is the design of the letterforms themselves, and a font, which is a specific implementation of a typeface. In the U.S., a typeface is absolutely not copyright-able, while most computer fonts are copyright-able, insomuch as they are a piece of "software" that gives a computer instructions on how to draw a specific typeface, but the underlying design itself is still not. A modern vector font contains all sorts of specific instructions on how to scale the shapes and spacing and hinting and etc etc, but a bitmap font (such as RCT's) is just a static representation of a typeface, and definitely is not separately copyright-able. A typeface can be protected by a "design patent", but this is fairly rare. Whatever the underlying typeface is that RCT's font is based on, it's certainly old enough that any protection, if any, has expired.

I can't speak for every country, but the laws in most of the other countries I've seen are pretty similar. For example, the UK protects typefaces for 25 years at most, and it's the same length for the EU. And again, that's the typeface, not the little low resolution bitmap representation of it. It's like if a newspaper wanted to sue a kidnapper for violating their copyright because he used cut-out letters from the newspaper to make a ransom note without permission to redistribute their font. That would be nonsense lol

TL;DR: The underlying typeface that RCT's font is based on may have had some legal protection at some point in time, but it almost certainly doesn't anymore, and the low-resolution bitmap representation of it is certainly not protected.