Forums » Suggestions

Add italics and bold to in-game chat

Aug 27, 2022 Sid123 link
More of a QoL suggestion than anything else. Not much to say, just add the ability to use italics and bold font in in-game messages. This could be done as in Discord

*text* for italics
**text** for bold

or as in the VO forums

Not really important or argument-worthy, so I'm just going to let this lie here. If and when the devs feel it's worth their time.
Aug 27, 2022 incarnate link
Soo.. we render-out and store the font in textures, for the game. Times 20 languages, with significant Unicode support. Some of the Asian languages get pretty intense, I think Hangul (Korean) is like ~18k characters? Others, like Arabic, are super complex to render due to "cursive" style and overlaid "ligatures", which vary positionally per-font (aside from being right-to-left).

Just to store enough font data, and be able to maintain them in memory on a modest mobile device, we use "distance field" techniques that are then offset, overlaid in R/G/B and packed into specialized multi-channel compressed textures.

The idea of doing some unified support for "italic" and "bold" sounds painful. I mean, we could do it just for Latin fonts or something, but it would still be a protocol change and some effort.

Anyway, the point being, doing this kind of thing in the game is a lot different from an app like Discord, which is literally just using the OS's own rendering, and doesn't have to do "everything" in-engine.

Basically, this would need to be really useful to justify the time.
Aug 27, 2022 Luxen link
If you want to add this via plugin, you can render your own fonts to an image and then divy them up - Spuck did this for comic sans a good while back. I can forward you his plugin example on discord if you want.
Aug 27, 2022 draugath link
A little off-topic, but regarding that plugin Luxen mentioned, it won't work for the chat window since it relies on creating multiple IUP labels to display the custom font. It would be nice if the function for changing the displayed font were available in the sandbox, though.
Aug 27, 2022 Inevitable link
Do you really want people using bold and italics, as if all caps isn't annoying enough? Sure it could be useful in some scenarios, but seems more like another thing moderators would have to tackle.
Aug 28, 2022 Snib link
> It would be nice if the function for changing the displayed font were available in the sandbox, though.

I don't know that plugin but all the necessary iup functions for rolling your own font seem to be available in the sandbox actually.