Oof, that's a lot of angry ignorant screaming. Silly me, trying to be helpful.
Don't be daft !
Take your own advice.
Freespace itself runs absolutely perfectly
Wing Commander DD mod runs absolutely perfectly
Derelict mod runs perfectly
Blue Planet mod runs perfectly
Destiny Of Peace (Silent Threat etc) mod runs perfectly
Halls of Valhalla runs perfectly
Storm Front runs perfectly
Sync runs perfectly
Transcend runs perfectly
etc etc etc
Between The Ashes is however Daffy Ducked
As is Wings of Dawn
This clearly suggests that the developers of those mods have messed with something that they shouldn't have
Yes, we've unearthed ancient secrets that were better left undisturbed. In our greed for wanting fonts that don't look like garbage, we've clearly messed with something that we shouldn't have.
/s
That they have tweaked settings that are specific to certain hardware or software rather than leave things more generic
Yeah, we added TTF f-
Oh niffiwan already explained this to you. Lemme just quote him again.
yeah... the issue is that a new text rendering feature with the FSO engine has issues on certain video cards. The feature is question is allowing the use of true-type fonts - which is a good thing as the old font handling was ugly and hard to work with. In any event it's certainly not the fault of the mod creators choosing to use that new feature. Throw stones at the SCP developers if you wish (yes, that includes me), equally I don't have access to an old Intel HD video card to even start trying to find & fix the issue.
I'd like to play those mods, but FFS I'm not going to buy specific hardware to be able to, that's crazy.
Don't be daft!
You're trying to play on
weak, old hardware. The Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600 is a integrated video chip from 2013, it is not exactly a modern day powerhouse from which you can expect to run everything in full HD at 144 fps. You don't have to throw a tantrum when someone suggest you might want to get better hardware to play. Wings of Dawn is a new, modern release, which uses a lot of cutting edge SCP features. Having a semi-decent dedicated videocard is kind of a requirement to run it smoothly.
You are the only one who has this specific issue with fonts. Everyone who reported font issues while running with old AMD cards have been helped by the link I posted before (afaik). It's just your specific case that has the issue.
So from the point of the developer, the issue lies on your end. There's only so much I can do.
Even if I did, do they even know themselves what hardware is specifically needed? There's no recommended hardware that I know of.
Because there's only so much hardware that we have available to us, that we can test it on.
The lowest specs I was able to test WoD on, which ran most of the game on 60fps (with shadows and the like disabled), except the final few missions. Was a i7-2670QM, 8GB Ram, with a GT 555M 2GB videocard.
This is an 8 year old laptop. WoD is a 2018-2019 release.
If ALL mods were affected by this text garbage crap then yes, different hardware would be a reasonable suggestion.
Since most mods work perfectly then the problem lies very obviously with those 2 mods. It's really up to the developers to fix it.
Its up to you to use a machine that can handle the game.
I mean, I already gave you a solution to restore the old font, and that didn't fix it for you (are you sure you installed it correctly?). There is nothing else I can do for you on my end, I can't magically reach through the internet and make your old hardware suddenly up to requirement.
You also seem to keep making this mistake in assuming that "well, I can run this mod released in 2013 on my old hardware without issue, so clearly that must mean I should also be able to run a mod released in 2017-2018 without issue, if not, then the developer is at fault."
There has been a lot of advancements made in the engine over the years. Modern releases using modern versions of FSO are probably going to require more modern hardware to run. That's PC gaming.
Right, so by that reckoning it can be assumed that you think the much vaunted Blue Planet mod is "ugly" and Transcend, and Wing Commander DD and all the rest???
That is not even remotely close to what niffiwan said. What the heck are you even on about, buddy? Calm your tits and read his post again.
We're talking about the old ugly font, not about
entire mods.Call me Mr Picky but I thought all those mods were pretty stunning work and made for a thoroughly enjoyable gaming experience. The quality of the font was frankly not on my mind at all as I was gunning down enemy ships.
So we have on the one hand, Mod developers who are/have successfully created brilliant Mods using the, how shall we call it? "basic" font rendering capabilities of FSO, and we have Mod Developers trying to use a newer FS feature which is clearly unsupported on some platforms and thus prevents a portion of the playing audience from experiencing the Mod. Struggling, honestly struggling to see the logic and strategy there.
If they can make brilliant Mods like BP and WCDD work just fine then surely other developers can do the same.
And YES it clearly IS a Mod choice because the Mod developer is choosing to use either specific versions of FSO or specific features of FSO which cause issues with certain hardware platforms. Why limit the playing audience just for the questionable benefit of true type fonts?
I'm going to call you Mr Ignoramus rather that Mr Picky, because you keep making these assumptions out of ignorance.
A. You assume that we developers ~magically~ know every single bug and issue before hand. Surprise!
No.
We don't have 100 of Q&A testers all running different hardware that will allow us to identify some obscure issue with fonts on old hardware before release. It's not like we looked at TFF fonts and made some conscious deliberate choice to shaft people with certain hardware. Again, you're making this assumption of deliberate malice on the developer end or something.
Kinda weird.B. The portion of the playing audience that seems unable to play so far basically only seems to be... You.
All the other people who have reported having issues with the new TFF font have been helped by installing the provided Fonts.tbl to 'restore' the old font.
C. True type fonts provide a lot of readability over the old ugly font and make all of the menus look a lot nicer. That's not 'questionable' benefit. That's tangible benefit.