AGS: Texts render incorrectly in some games

[tag2015]

In some games the ingame fonts appear strangely compressed and missing some pixels. This can be worked around enabling the "force text antialiasing" option which seems to fix the problem, but also adds a shadow and makes the text harder to read especially on backgrounds with similar color.

This happens with any scaler/size.

I have attached some screenshots with antialiasing disabled and enabled. These are just a sample but there are probably many others affected.

[eriktorbjorn]

I don't know for sure if it's the same bug, but there are text rendering differences in the freeware version of Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! as well. At least under Linux.

​https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/860/

[eriktorbjorn]

Another possible example is Puzzle Bots, which I bought from the Wadjet Eye Games web site. In the upstreams AGS engine:

And in ScummVM:

[tag2015]

This bugreport is a bit outdated now.
Using latest git, I noticed that the situation has improved for games using low-res fonts (such as Case Noir and Broken Windows). Now the fonts are not "crushed", there are still some missing pixels but the text is clearly readable.
On the other hand, the "force text antialiasing" option now does absolutely nothing.

For games using hires fonts, I noticed the same problems that eriktorbjorn reported on the demos of 3GEEKS and Grandma Badass, Larry Lotter and others...

[tag2015]

Similar issue reported for Willow House (https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/14133)

[windlepoons]

Similar font issue in Starship Quasar. (#14137)

[GateKeeper-Adventurer]

The same thing happens in The Samaritan Paradox too, even to the point that sometimes the texts in ScummVM are hard to read.

It should also be noted that the entire text box takes more space on screen in ScummVM, even though the text itself is smaller, which can be easily seen by looking how the words are placed on different text lines inside the text screen.

[GateKeeper-Adventurer]

I tried to see if I can make The Samaritan Paradox work better with different settings. It was a partial success. Turning the anti-aliasing off made the text readable.

But as a side effect, the most bizarre thing happened!
The protagonist closeup image that is supposed to be on the left side of the text box moved to the right side of the text box!

To make sure this wasn't a random coincidence I repeated this twice with same results.

[tag2015]

Similar issue in Gobliiins5 (copied from bugreport https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/14463):

the text and the subitles, when played over scummvm, is harder to read, because the font is thicker (pic1), as with standalone (pic2) without scummvm. i have uploaded 2 pictures for comparison.
https://bugs.scummvm.org/attachment/ticket/14463/pic1.jpg
https://bugs.scummvm.org/attachment/ticket/14463/pic2.jpg

[tag2015]

From bugreport https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/13412 regarding Zniw's Adventure

The immediately obvious issue is the bad wrapping of the "Cycle immediately" text.
But if you can switch back and forth between the two screenshots you can notice that the glyphs actually seem different (look at 's' or 'm'), and also text that is more intense (semi-bold?) in the original does not appear bold at all in ScummVM.

[salty-horse]

I see a similar issue in ​Shards of God.

[antoniou79]

This was discussed in Discord yesterday but it seems that at least a few of these issues are due to AGS (upstream) still using a very old FreeType library (v2.1.3), the sources of which are part of the AGS repository and have been updated (lightly) to fix a few bugs.

ScummVM on the other hands uses an external FreeType library which should be a more recent version (currently the latest is 2.13.0).

When forcing the upstream AGS code to use recent versions of FreeType the font glyph rendering presents similar issues to ScummVM AGS engine, and on 2.13.0 I get identical bugs for a couple of games I've tested (The Castle and Dreams in the Witch House).

There is an open issue about this over on AGS github and I've written my findings there (with screenshots):
​https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/1528

[tag2015]

After the merge of commit ​ff03764,
most games using hi-res fonts should display properly, or at least much better than before (there may still be some minor kerning/alignment differences compared to upstream due to freetype differences).

The following games mentioned in this bugreport should be fine now:

• Nelly Cootalot (standard / HD)
• Willow House
• Starship Quasar
• Larry Lotter
• The Samaritan Paradox (although the antialiased fonts look a bit different)

[eriktorbjorn]

Here's Puzzle Bots with the current Git version:

Not quite identical (most noticeably the position of the "e" in "one", so kerning differences seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation), but good enough for me. Thanks!

[tag2015]

After the merge of the Freetype PR, it seems all the remaining issues have been addressed.
I quickly tested the following games and found no differences comparing with upstream AGS:

• Broken Windows 1
• Suspicious Mind
• Case Noir
• Zniw Adventure
• Puzzle Bots
• The Samaritan Paradox
• Shards of God

If anybody wants to check... then we can finally close this bug

[salty-horse]

I can confirm Shards of God looks fine now.

[tag2015]

I'm closing this bugreport. If new issues are found it can be reopened (or new, more specific bugreports can be created)