Seems odd as the existing floattxt.bam is not moved at all in the 18px and 20px ! But the toolfont.bam is twice in the two later cases ... what's up with that ?!?

Oh, indeed, thank you. It was ljbo who did the Weidu version of this, I barely touched it and I guess neither of us tested the 18 and 20 pixel versions.

Reuploaded the correct version now.

Also I look at a few very old instructions and there's a reference to the stonsml.bam file, which seems to be a normal.bam font file just renamed, but your mod doesn't have it. It might have been that Ghostdog's mod used a special code(Font_chu_patch.tph) that makes the GUI use the normal.bam instead of the stonsml.bam, so multiple of mods installed together would result in different output than each one as a single handily.

Yeah, I don't know what was up with that Ghostdog's patch. I guess ljbo just copied his code. This mod isn't supposed to make any changes to the GUI, so I removed the patch and all references to it.

As for the 4 pictures, Tooltips and Item Descriptions use the same font file, hence only 3 files.

Upon further inspection, I found out that using this method produces font files, in which letters are a little bit jumpy. Some glyphs are 1 pixels higher than they should be, or 1 pixel too far to the left, etc. It's less visible with some fonts, more visible with others (definetly more visible with my font, but less so with Arial... basically the thinner the font, the less there's problems with it)

I don't know whether this is the result of Beamdog's work, BMFont's or BGFNT's. Either way, some program works a little bit not as expected. The solution would be to take the font you're interested in and slightly alter the glyphs, for example to take the "i" glyph and move it 1 pixel down, etc.

I'll see about doing it some time this week, I think.

Hey. Some Japanese contributor made a tool to convert fonts into BGEE format.

http://forum.baldurs...-tool-bgfnt-exe

Since it's all in Japanese, I'll leave you a short guide in English that I figured out through google translate.

1) Download and install BMFont: v1.13 (358KB)

2) Extract NORMAL.FNT and NORMAL.BMP from the game files. You can extract BMPs with WinBiff from data/fonts.bif and then extract FNTs with NearInfinity.

3) Download the Japanese BGEE Font Tool and unzip it: https://dl.dropboxus...ool_ver.1.2.zip

4) Place the NORMAL.fnt and NORMAL.BMP into the same folder with the tool. Then run through console: bgfnt -e NORMAL.fnt char.txt

5) A text file "char.txt" will appear. You will need it later. Now open the BMFont program.

6) Go into Options -> Font Settings. Use these settings:

Font: <your desired font>
Charset: Unicode
Size: <your desired size>
Render from TrueType
outline: CHECK
TrueType hinting: CHECK
Font smoothing: CHECK
Super sampling: CHECK
level: 2
Outline thickness: 0

Now go into Options -> Export Options:

Padding: 0 for all
Spacing: 1 for all
Texture: width: 1024 height: 1024
Bit depth: 32
Channel Value: "glyph" for all. Inverted is not checked.
Font descriptor: XML
Textures: png
Compression: Deflate

Now click Edit -> Clear all chars in font

And then Edit -> Select chars from file -- and now you open that "char.txt"

Now Options -> Save bitmap font as and save it under any name, let's say "test.fnt"

7) Now take "test.fnt" and "test_0.png" that the program generated and place them into the BGEE Font Tool folder.

8) Delete "normal.fnt" and "normal.png" from that folder. Then run: bgfnt -c normal.fnt test.fnt

9) The program will generate "normal.fnt" and "normal.bmp" files. Place them into the game's "override" folder (create one if necessary).

DONE!

I only tried it with Arial so far, and it worked. I'm going to try it with my fonts now and update the first post if everything is in order.

French language would require not just one, but a dozen glyphs - éèêëçàâîôùûœ, etc. You could borrow the glyphs from basic letters and then manually draw the accents (except for œ, which would require some more effort). I could describe to you the pipeline if you're interested (would take you a few hours to do the whole thing, more or less).

On a side note, I've actually had the misfortune of playing the french version and it's just execrable - the voices, the translation, everything... it's better to avoid it if you can and play with a dictionary.

Trent Oster finally answered and as it turns out they are indeed using home-built tools. So with that, the hope of custom BGEE fonts is dead in the water I guess.

Was unsatisfied with a few things.

1) In item description, the space between words and between lines was too big. Reduced it. Would've reduced the space between lines even further, but the engine doesn't allow it.

2) Floating text was some unrelated font. Now it's almost like vanilla, but bigger.

Left image: original. Right image: modded.

Reuploaded the files in the first post.

@ljbo

Um, is there a reason the weidu version installs "normal.bam" as "norma1.bam"?

I just tried your version and the game simply doesn't load norma1.bam to use as font. I then tried manually renaming norma1.bam to normal.bam and the game crashes, saying something about the .chu file. So I removed the .chu file from the .tp2 and I also renamed norma1 to normal. Now everything seems to work, it just copies the three files in the override folder.

What was Ghostdog's hack supposed to do anyway? Why did he want the game to load the bam file with a custom name? Also, it talks about normal1.bam in the comment section, but trying that name didn't help either - the game was still crashing. 

@Almateria

Could you try the new version? The old weidu version didn't work for me either, but this one does.

>The dialog box reply fonts are just tiring to look at and not legible, no matter which size

Oh? Did you try the weidu version? If so, could you try the non-weidu version pls?

>the floating text is also illegible on a mixed background, item desc has those weird long spaces and line breaks, and tooltips are somehow cut off

If anything is different from the images in the first post with the non-weidu version, could I ask you to show a screenshot please?

Sure. You can install it last. If you install it somewhere in the middle, I think some mods can biff fonts (don't know which mod does that, but it happened to me in the past) and then you won't be able to uninstall this mod, but if that isn't a concern for you then the order of installation doesn't matter at all.

Ok, well, this is as much as I could achieve through substitution: 

You might notice that the font had to be slightly modified to fit the predetermined glyph boxes, so it lost some of its features and most of its finesse, unfortunately. It's clumsy now. Can't modify the width of the space character either. Can't modify size...

Well, if anyone's interested, I'm going to attach the files, just drop them into the "override" folder (create it if you don't have it).

I'll be keeping my fingers crossed to get an answer from the Tofer guy, cause I'm not satisfied with this...

If you explain your trick to me

This is what I'm doing right now.

1) Extract BMPs with WinBiff from data/fonts.bif

2) Extract FNTs with NearInfinity.

3) Open BMP files in photoshop, flip vertically if the image is reversed, and manually replace letters. This is quite cumbersome since they have shuffled the glyphs in certain BMPs in order to pack them as tightly as possible.

So I just tried substituting the glyphs and it needs more tinkering to see if it would work out in the end, because right now there is a problem.

I can change any glyph successfully, but I can't change the coordinates for the glyph box in the FNT file. This results in problematic situations. For example, my font's "Q" letter is very different from theirs - it's takes much less space horizontally. Their Q is well rounded, mine is more oval. And so since I can't change the box's size in the FNT file, I'm stuck with their Q's box, and my Q simply doesn't occupy the box completely. It results in empty space to the sides of my Q.

Visual explanation of the problem:

In game it looks like there's too much space between letters.

This can be redeemed by stretching the Q horizontally, but then the Q looks stretched, which doesn't look good. So this isn't an option.

Now the good thing is that there are other fonts in the bifs. Some of those fonts may have boxes that are similar to the ones I need. And maybe it's possible to use other glyph's boxes by tinkering with the FNT file. I'm going to try those things out, but hopefully Cameron Tofer will respond soon...

I've been redirected to this person (Cam the Font Meister that Trent was talking about), maybe he will end up answering my question. It's the most promising route so far.

As to the the substitution technique, I'm going to try it right now to see if it works. If it does, I'll explain it here in details.

No, only the people who got the game on Beamdog's site can access the beta. I got it on steam.

I've read it too about the new font size feature. I'm not completely satisfied with their font unfortunately. It's not that bad, but it's quite different (too thin) from the original one (because bio lost all assets). If nothing changes, I think I'll just substitute their glyphs with mine in the bmp files manually when the slider feature arrives.

So about bg2ee... it's been a year and pretty much nothing has changed other than that they've biffed those files.

1) Their game simply doesn't use normal.bam anymore, wherever you put it.

2) You can find NORMAL.FNT and NORMAL.BMP in the bifs. You can unbif them, put them into the movies folder, then slightly modify the .bmp file in photoshop (like cross a few letters) and you will see the effect in the game - which means their fonts can be overriden. However, we still need to find what software they used to create the correct .FNT file. The game simply crashes if you try to use a FNT file created by any other program. They seem to have used some unusual font descriptor... I've asked Trent Oster again, but I doubt he'll reply.

Tomorrow I'll have a go at every possible bitmap font generator I can find - maybe they used one of those. But I doubt it, they probably wrote something of their own (for whatever reason...).

Huh, I'm going to redownload BG2EE and see if I can make it work this way.

Also, their font files might have been created by this program http://www.angelcode...roducts/bmfont/ (couldn't find it a year ago, but now it's high on google, so I'll give it a try as well)

I remember looking into it a year ago. BG2EE doesn't load font files from the override folder, they have completely overhauled the way fonts are loaded. You could replace their font with any other, except they're packed in a format I couldn't figure out how to use. Letters are drawn in a simple bmp image file, and there is an additional .FNT file that probably describes the coordinates for each glyph.

I asked Trent Oster on twitter to provide the utility to convert standard font files to bg2ee format, he said he's going to consult his "font meister" and then I never heard back from him again. Unless someone comes up with a way to convert fonts to this format, the bg2ee font situation is going to remain rather grim.

I couldn't open the .FNT file, and this is how the bmp files look like:

I'm currently playing with Fade for the first time, but I installed this mod a year ago. I'm in chapter 6 (I think) of SOA. If I reinstall it now (to get the TOB content), will it just seamlessly continue into TOB or will it mess things up?

Wow! Thanks, I've added your .zip file (and a link) into the first post so people don't miss it.

Such a coincidence, too. Started playing BG2 again just yesterday and I've also been looking into how to make it into a weidu mod since this morning, I was literally reading packaging tutorials right when I saw your post. Guess now I won't have to. 

1) After entering the Unseeing Eye section of the sewers, where the Lich's crypt is, after vanquishing the blind beholder, Fade kept trying to initiate dialogue with CHARNAME, but only the Player Initiated Dialogue options would pop up. This repeated until leaving the map.

It just happened to me. After you defeat the Unseeing Eye and take the stairs to the The Old Tunnels ("AR0202"), Fade keeps initiating the dialogue every 2 seconds, but the only dialogue you get is what you can see on the screenshot. It keeps happening until you leave the area completely.

Thanks, I'll try it later today. But I'm really curious what the talk is about! I'm sort of OCD and I can't miss things arrghh. Any chance you can put it in here pls?

A few months later, but I thought I might as well report it: I had to uninstall this mod because of a stutter problem as well. When I reached the Underdark (had a party of Xan, Kivan, Viconia, Jaheira and Valygar), Viconia hit a point where she seemed like she really needed to say something to Valygar. They kept facing each other, the cursor would blink on an off, and it was impossible to get her to move more than a few steps. I tried to force-trigger her next talk (which would've been about the Aboleth, if memory serves), tried removing Valygar from the party, nothing worked. Then I removed the mod, and all was well.

It's a shame too, I was enjoying it I should also add that I have the La'Valygar mod installed, but I have no idea whether that's just a coincidence or if it actually had an impact on the fact that Viconia was trying to talk to him.

I was also surprised to get a love declaration from her at the end of ToB...even though my PC was female and romancing Xan. But again, I have no idea whether that was due to having had this mod installed. And her epilogue played out correctly anyway, so it was just a "wtf" moment.

This bug still exists. Happened to me in Underdark as well. With Valygar, too. I loaded the game a few times and each time she's attempting to start a dialogue with Valygar.

I found what you are referring to, but that's a bit beyond my level. 

Found that somebody else had the same bug over a year ago http://www.shsforums...ports/?p=549575

Hi.

Here's how it is. I'm well deep into the game (underdark).

Viconia turns to Valygar, but the conversation doesn't fire up. She stops doing whatever she's doing once every 2 seconds and turns to him. She can barely move, since she cancels all actions once every 1-2 seconds.

Killing him or her helps temporarily and the game is playable while at least one of them is dead. After I ress them both, the bug immediately reoccurs and the game becomes unplayable again.

(I'm not sure whether it's IEP or banter pack's bug)

How can I resolve this and help you fix it?

Downloaded it, thanks!