Blurry, murky fonts in Patch 469d for win XP

[Patrick Bateman]

I noticed it when i tried first 469 for win XP - that was 469b.
Now i see it was not fixed even in 469d version of patch. Fonts in 469 for win XP is kinda blurry. In 436\451 fonts are crystal clear, but in 469 they are blurry. Why is that and can it be fixed? It is really annoying and disappointing. Patches should FIX problems, not create them, imho.
Here are screenshots for comparison:

[Shrimp]

I disagree that it's blurry - it's certainly a different look, now with anti-aliasing/blending being based on TTF fonts (AFAIK) rather than bitmap fonts, for better resolution and GUI scaling flexibility, as well as supporting unicode characters.

It's a trade-off of the classic/original look versus being able to ensure the game scales better with hardware and displays into the future.

[sn260591]

The solution is there https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTour ... -986282194

[anth]

The original font textures were generated using a much older version of Window's font engine. We had to regenerate the fonts to scale them up for larger displays, but unfortunately, the smallest fonts look quite different, even if we disable anti-aliasing.

If you absolutely hate the updated fonts, you can either:
- Restore the UWindowFonts.utx and LadderFonts.utx files from the 432/436 version
- Or tick the "Override GUI Scaling" checkbox in the Options>Preferences>Video menu and slide the GUI Scale slider to the right until the fonts look ok to you

[Eternity]

This patch is initially supposed to be for modern systems support. And smeared fonts is normal for modern systems, since they always pass through rescaling/filtering... In most of the cases you no longer have crystal sharp fonts like in XP and older systems anymore.
Even if you try, it doesn't work well on a very high resolution displays then. Rescaling/filtering appears the only way to make it look more or less acceptable with any resolution.
I decided to not fix it for UT as well, because in most of other software fonts are always smeared anyway, so just have to get used to it...

[_21]

@Patrick Bateman

As noted by, you can restore the oldschool 436 pixel fonts by restoring the font textures from a clean 436 installation. That way you can have the latest 469 patch and pixel fonts.

@Shrimp

The new anti-aliased fonts are rather anemic on when the font size is small.
The letter 'k' here is barely visible here and is hard to read.

See the screenshot:

anemic-font.png (4.81 KiB) Viewed 845 times

If its possible please increase the weight of the font for the next release.
Or the very least increase the contrast.

In the final image players will use gamma correction to brighten the image.
Maybe the fonts need to be adjusted to accommodate for that.