Russian version font reworking

[Litude]

As promised, I started working on remaking the Russian fonts once the FontEditor got released. Thought it might be a good idea to create a thread about the work to get some opinions about the font and suggestions for possible improvements.

The original character maps:

antiqua.fnt (pictured), briefing.fnt (same shape)


gray.fnt


maina.fnt (pictured), metal.fnt (same shape), won.fnt (same shape)


mainb.fnt (pictured), game.fnt (identical?)


mini.fnt (pictured)


outline.fnt (pictured)

As you can see, the Russian fonts are very bulky and big, lacking the smoothness seen in the fonts that the other languages use.

I'm aiming to update this thread each time I complete a font set.

[Litude]

gray.fnt
gray.fnt seemed like a nice place to start from, the basic shapes are also shared by outline.fnt, mainb.fnt and game.fnt so with a little bit of work all of these will also soon get finished.

Anyways, I started off with the basic gray.fnt from the English version of the game wiping out all the international characters. Ripped the basic shapes of the Russian characters from unicode_game.fnt which I then modified slightly to better fit within the style that's used in gray.fnt. I also decided to use the basic Latin characters in case the Cyrillic and Latin characters were a near perfect match (I'm not too familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet but I assume it's okay?).

Below are two pictures showing the serf description with the old font and the new changed font respectively.

The font might seem a bit small when compared to the old one, but it should be pretty much the same size as the original latin gray.fnt.

I also decided to add Cyrillic letters used in other Cyrillic alphabets than just Russian if someone at some point would be interested in translating the game to e.g. Serbian. The layout is based on Windows-1251 and ended up looking like this:


Pretty pleased with the job myself, but I'm here to hear your suggestions for improvements.

[Krom]

Litude, please attach changed fonts to the thread (or send them to my email), so that they could be updated by me (or other Russian-speaking members). E.g. 'y' should be lower by 1-2 pixels, and etc...

Netherless - great job! I wish you complete it soon! ))

P.S. What is unicode_game.fnt? I didn't had it in my Russian TPR game.. Can you send it to me as well plz?

[Litude]

I sent you the modified gray.fnt and all the Russian unicode fonts. Check your e-mail.

[Krom]

I've got your mail and looked into unicode fonts. They are the same structure as normal, but they just have 65000 letters vs 256 letters for normal fonts And since 99% of those 65k letter places are unused (empty) I'm not sure on to how to export/import them, cos resulting BMP would be 256 times as tall... Do you think you need to edit them?

[Litude]

Alright, did some work yet again. There were a few things I was disappointed with in antiqua.fnt (some characters were too thin) so I did some slight modifications.
Here's the font set plus the serf description picture:


I also finished up outline.fnt, mainb.fnt and mini.fnt:


That still leaves the two most difficult font sets still to be done.

[Krom]

Litude, tweaked antiqua.fnt looks really good, strokes width are ok now

I hope to add individual character Y offset control to FontEd soon, then it will be easier to fix some mistakes in letter positions.

Do you have anything else I could add to FontEd?

[Litude]

antiqua.fnt (and briefing.fnt)
It took a bit longer because I had a bunch of exams but here it is anyway:

It's obviously a first version and I'm very open to suggestions as I had a bunch of trouble finding the appropriate style for certain letters, e.g. the lower case Russian M is certainly not going to end up like that.

Here are two examples of the font being used in-game:



Now as this is probably the font you see the most in the game I'd really like the font to look as good as possible. But as I'm no real pixel artist so all suggestions/criticisms/nitpicks/whatever is more than welcome even if you're non too familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet.

[Litude]

Alright, I did some slight modifications to antiqua.fnt (& briefing.fnt) and finished maina.fnt (& metal.fnt & won.fnt).

The altered antiqua.fnt:


...and the new maina.fnt:


Finally, here's what the main menu looks like with the new font:


As they're now all usable, I thought I'd put them up for download if someone wants to see how they work in-game. Naturally, the text in the game has not been formatted to work correctly with the new fonts so random empty lines etc. will prolly show up in messages when using these.

Anyways get them from here and as always, I'm very open to suggestions.

[Nuutburz]

Hello to all! I really happy, that you guys from other countries are working at russian translation!!! How can i help you? And can I export russian sound files, like briefings, sounds of battle, voices of units and peasants? For example, in russian version of TSK the voice of briefings and units are very cool and magnificent ?
P.S. When the russian patch will be ready?
:oops:

[Nuutburz]

@Litude. "Second crown" is bad name for the game. In russian the first name was "War and Peace".

[Litude]

So do you think the title should be changed?

[Nuutburz]

Yes, i think so. We calling game "War and Peace" more often, than "Second Crown". And using only russian TSK in multiplayer game. I can sent picture to you, if you haven't it.
P.S. A lot of sorry for my bad-bad english!!!!! :oops: :oops:

[Litude]

But I can't support the idea of making both titles carry the same title (if second crown was changed to war and peace, both games would have the same name). That would be very confusing. Also, if the title was changed we'd need someone with artistic skills to make a new logo.

[Krom]

I don't think it's a good idea to change usual games title. There's TSK and TPR, period.