Suggestion/nitpick

[Gideon Zhi]

Speaking as someone with an eye for even the tiniest of localization issues (I can be an extraordinary perfectionist) there's one thing about the recent batch of Persona 2 screenshots that has been bugging the crap out of me: the tops of certain letters in the dialog - p, q, y, and g - pop up above the horizontal center line in the text. I'm sure tehre's a technical term for this, but I don't know what it is.

Here's a picture to illustrate what I mean, edited from one of the RPGamer press shots:

Click here to see! Image was huge.

You'll notice that the tops of every other letter align nicely in a line, and these four are out of alignment with them. This appears to be the case in Persona 1 Portable as well - must show that I haven't played much of it! (I DID buy it though, on launch day even!) I'll still buy Persona 2, mind, and it may be too late to fix this, but once you see it it's kind of hard to forget.

[Ce Ilhuicamina]

It's supposed to look like that Duh, since the original games were launched in the 90's they used a "Typewriter text" style for the dialogues in the games which means that some letters may be not completly aligned with the rest, obviously looking ahead of their times to cause an effect of nostalgia on the future re-releases of both games.

LOL

[Evilkinggumby]

Of all the nit pick complaints I have seen or could see for a game .. THIS has got to be the nittiest pick of them all. It tops the taco in spades...

I appreciate the fact you actually admit it is likely too late to fix it, and that you are especially nitpicky in general.. but.. if that is the case, did you actually have a motive to post this? Knowing in all likelihood no one but a spare few would see it, let alone cite it as an issue?

[Gideon Zhi]

Originally Posted by Evilkinggumby

I appreciate the fact you actually admit it is likely too late to fix it, and that you are especially nitpicky in general.. but.. if that is the case, did you actually have a motive to post this? Knowing in all likelihood no one but a spare few would see it, let alone cite it as an issue?

A few reasons.
First, if it ISN'T too late to fix it, it's something that in all probability would take less than five minutes to tweak. Second, in case Atlus re-uses this font in another future title (such as a very hypothetical PSP port of Eternal Punishment), the issue has been raised. Third, Atlus's localizations are generally top-notch, and something like this is generally an extraordinarily easy fix that would improve the quality by degrees.

And lastly, as previously mentioned, it bugs the crap out of me I do my damnedest not to have stuff like this in my own localization work, and I'm constantly tweaking fonts to make sure small issues like this aren't present. I've been doing this stuff for over a decade, and during that time I've both learned a lot and made a fair few such mistakes myself; I consider myself something of an authority on the topic.

[Inzaghi]

It is too late to change this, but we'll keep it in mind for future projects.

[Enzeru]

Pretty sure it's the same font as Persona 1, anyhow.

[Yukichin]

Honestly, I didn't even notice it. I think the font looks pretty even. Then again, I've been nitpicking the font of Silent Hill: Downpour, which looks AlMoSt LiKe ThIs.

[Gideon Zhi]

Originally Posted by Inzaghi

It is too late to change this, but we'll keep it in mind for future projects.

Alright! Thanks for listening. That's all I really wanted out of this.

[Laronmi]

While we're on the topic of typography, I have a quick question: How do you guys choose what typeface to use for the games? I don't know anything about the localization process, but I'm guessing that the most important part of choosing a font for a game is how it adapts to the space it has to work with.

I mean, just looking at the P2p screenshots, it looks like the dialogue boxes don't use any kerning, which makes sense because Japanese character types probably don't need kerning like roman letter types do. Same thing with the x-height; roman letter types need ascender and descender heights, while Japanese character types--to the best of my knowledge--do not. I can't identify the font used in the game from the screenshots (I can't even tell if the lowercase e has a straight or angled bar, but then again I've been awake for over 40 hours and am seeing spots in my peripheral vision), but it's clear that it's not a font that was designed to deal with the issue of being forced into a line of text with no room for kerning, ascenders, or descenders.

Makes me wonder if there's a font out that can work with a fixed square letter space and not be all over the place.


...That didn't seem like so many words in my head.

[Gideon Zhi]

Originally Posted by Laronmi

Makes me wonder if there's a font out that can work with a fixed square letter space and not be all over the place.

This actually works, at lower resolutions. Check out 8x8 things like this, this, or this. (I apologize for linking to bitmaps, but the editors I use for older games can dump and insert bitmaps with extreme ease, so it's my preferred format for these matters and I'm just linking you to some examples from my archive.) Things like this work great on older consoles like the NES and Gameboy, which are largely tile-based. You're going to be stuck with 8x8 chunks of graphics anyway, and neither has much RAM for doing the fancier font tricks you get on later systems like the SNES (where binary logic can be used to "paint" a picture of the text in RAM; it's still tiled, but you don't see it that way unless you look at the underlying memory) or the PS1 (where you can just assign a sprite to each letter and throw a crapton of them up onto the screen.)

As your font's resolution increases however, having perfectly square roman glyphs is bad. it either ends up being really blocky and ugly, or you end up with a lot of space between each letter and it's ugly. (The Terranigma Effect. Though I think Terranigma's font is 12x16 fixed, not 16x16, you can still get a good idea of what's going on here.) Thankfully more modern consoles like the SNES and the Genesis, and beyond of course, have the RAM to allow fancier tricks, such as the fully proportional fonts like you'll see in some of Squaresoft's later SNES titles. Here's a fun exercise: Take a screenshot from Final Fantasy "2" with some text on the screen and segment it into a grid of 8x8 boxes. Notice how nicely the letters all fit within the boxes! (Incidentally, FF2 SNES is another good example of a font working well in 8x8.) Then take Final Fantasy "3" and try to do the same thing - you won't be able to. This is because the developers have, as stated earlier, have shifted each letter and then used binary logic to paint it between two tiles while still retaining the data currently *in* the tiles. It's pretty technical, but I hope I'm explaining it well.

You don't see kerning too often, not even on modern consoles, but I'm not sure why. I know on the SNES it'd be a real headache to do; you'd basically need a huge table somewhere in the game program that lists every possible combination of two characters in the game's font and has an appropriate value with which to kern. This is likely easier (certainly more feasible) on more modern consoles, but I don't have a lot of experience with those and can't really say much about why kerning is or is not used.

[lol, forums]

I'm pretty sure that's done on purpose because the amount of space allotted for a letter's descender is so little that all the letter with a descender would look too short otherwise. As to why so little space was allotted for that, I have no idea.

[Laronmi]

Originally Posted by Gideon Zhi

This actually works, at lower resolutions. Check out 8x8 things like this, this, or this......

Oh, yeah. Tile based games and bitmap typefaces do work with the whole fixed-width thing. At smaller resolutions, where the typefaces are built pixel by pixel, issues with descenders and whatnot are pretty much nonexistent. After all, with only a limited amount of pixel space to work with, the ratio differences are too small to represent, and it looks fine to our eyes.

It took me a while to get the second paragraph (Brain's kinda dead; sorry!) but I see what you mean about the painting between two tiles bit. But what I'm seeing for both SNES examples is that the type, like the sprites, were created pixel by pixel. There's no anti-aliasing going on anywhere. I'm completely ignorant as to how anything in the games are programmed, but I'm guess that this means it's possible to cheat the system, so to speak. If the typeface is created pixel by pixel, then a fake descender can be created simply by bumping up the baseline for every letter up a pixel or two.

I don't know if anything I'm typing makes sense, so here's a link to a picture to illustrate what I was trying to say. I don't know if that picture makes sense, either.

Originally Posted by Gideon Zhi

You don't see kerning too often, not even on modern consoles, but I'm not sure why. I know on the SNES it'd be a real headache to do; you'd basically need a huge table somewhere in the game program that lists every possible combination of two characters in the game's font and has an appropriate value with which to kern. This is likely easier (certainly more feasible) on more modern consoles, but I don't have a lot of experience with those and can't really say much about why kerning is or is not used.

Tracking is easier than kerning, probably. And maybe because of the way that Japanese characters are rendered? I DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT HERE.

WARNING: PERSON COMPLETELY IGNORANT ABOUT THE PROCESS OF GAME LOCALIZATION IS ABOUT TO SPOUT WACKY IDEAS ABOUT IT. CONTINUE TO READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

Since the process I talked about above only works with bitmap typefaces that are not rendered with anti-alias, for games that have typefaces that do rely on anti-alias, that "bump up the letters a few pixels" trick can't really be used. I'm assuming that an entirely new typeface isn't created for every game that's localized, which means that the type we see in-game must already have existed somewhere else and was imported into the game.

If a typeface that was designed for print or web is used, then that means the individual characters have been designed for a media format capable of rendering kerning, ascenders, descenders, etc. But Japanese characters don't require any of that, so when the type is displayed, it has to adjust itself to make sure that it fits inside the boundaries. Here, have another picture!

I'm using Chinese, but I think Japanese characters do the same thing? I mean, each individual character fits nice and neatly into their own box! Nothing spills over, everyone has their own space, it's all nice. Even the punctuation uses up all the space it has. (There are no spaces between sentences; the space comes with the punctuation. If you ever see someone online from China/Japan type in English, but they don't use spaces after punctuation marks, that is why.)

Let's ignore the fact that I used a fixed-width font here and focus on roman letters. They do not fit nice and neatly into each box, even when the character width is the same as the boxes. Even after taking away the boxes and leaving just line-heights, the letters still don't fit neatly. If we take the letters with descenders and move them so that they rest on the baseline, it looks...really ugly. If we decrease the size of those characters, it doesn't look quite as ugly, but it's not good either.

I have no idea whether the text for a game is stored in "boxes" (each line of text has a specific character limit) or "lines" (each line of text does not have a specific character limit, so fluid width fonts can be used with greater effect) or even if what I'm saying makes any sense. But the point remains that without some tweaking, pre-existing vector based typefaces probably do not play nicely with line-heights designed for Japanese characters and must be adjusted. This is what causes that unsightly uneven height. Also, I have a plate of spaghetti next to me that looks like it's moving, so I'm not sure if I am typing words that make sense, or if I have somehow typed out an incantation to summon the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I need sleep.


BUT ANYWAY, tl;dr, if the in-game typeface that is used is a pre-existing type created for use in print/web/etc., it will not play nice with the way that Japanese characters have defined the line-height. I don't know how easy/difficult it is to modify the line-heights, but if it isn't something that's easily done, then maybe someone could come up with a typeface designed for video game localization. Instead of resting the letters on the baseline, all letters without descenders are bumped up a few pixels, creating a fake descender of sorts. If used for print or web, the typeface would look utterly ridiculous, since the various letter heights would be all over the place. But for games where the line-height is based off Japanese characters, it could work.

Originally Posted by lol, forums

I'm pretty sure that's done on purpose because the amount of space allotted for a letter's descender is so little that all the letter with a descender would look too short otherwise. As to why so little space was allotted for that, I have no idea.

I think so little space was allotted for descenders because of the way Japanese typefaces handle them. This page explains things so much better than I ever could.



oh god I'm just going to shut up and go to sleep now in this hole in the ground

[Iris]

Originally Posted by Laronmi

WARNING: PERSON COMPLETELY IGNORANT ABOUT THE PROCESS OF GAME LOCALIZATION IS ABOUT TO SPOUT WACKY IDEAS ABOUT IT. CONTINUE TO READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

I love this disclaimer. If I had mod powers I would gleefully go around editing it into...so many posts here.

[Salbert]

wow. im glad i dont have ocd.

[KezzieZ]

Meh. It doesn't bother me a ton, but I can see how it can be irritating.

It probably has something to do with size constraints and aesthetic choices in those boundaries (or that they simply had that typeface and it was easy to plug in), but I don't know much about typefaces or the detail choices that go into localizations.

Honestly? I'm just glad we're finally getting an official release of IS. Present-day Atlus tends to be good about this sort of thing (as far as I know), but I've had various "no export for you" disappointments from game developers and distributors so I'm always overjoyed to see foreign games I'm interested in getting North American releases.