Hi there,
Just having an issue with my fonts when i bring the project into unity 4.
My fonts are using their own pre rendered font texture and my own custom shader. When I look at the font component, it says the font size is zero. Then when I try to alter that it just says -
Any ideas on how i could fix this?
Sorry if this is a repeat post but I couldnt find any others.
Thanks
Pete
The font system changed quite a bit in Unity 4. Unfortunately it’s more difficult to use now, since font texture atlases are not generated in any coherent way. I’d like to see this reverted, since there’s no particular advantage (I’m not convinced there’s any real space savings) and plenty of complaints from people using bitmap fonts.
–Eric
Wow, that’s weird! I guess there must be a bit of a backlash about this, I thought heaps of people used bitmap fonts.
It’s also kinda weird that unity 4 lets you save the font bitmaps from within Unity but then you can’t really do anything with them…
Are the Unity developers aware of the complaints? Have they made any comment on possibly reverting the system?
it will definitely not be reverted.
The font system was replaced so it supports dynamic fonts on all platforms. Previously it only supported bitmap fonts outside the desktop which is simply put inacceptable for mobile as you can forget the idea of localization or reasonable texture usage for non-western languages.
If you want to use bitmap fonts there are many (even free) systems available on the store for this purpose which not only use bitmaps but also do mesh batching and support bmfont / bm glyph etc giving you much more than Unitys inbuilt font system running on bitmap font will ever give you be it on the performance or the feature end.
I can see how having characters flipped in the layout making editing trickier but it is not that bad.
My main issue is Unity limiting font sizes to 512pts which if you are trying to generate a large 4096 X 4096 font texture is only large enough (for most fonts) to fill about 50% of the texture.
That’s fine, but surely it can’t be that difficult to recognize custom fonts using the old method and import them in the old 3.5 way.
I haven’t seen any free font systems. I’ll have to check the store again…
Dreamora, I’m trying to revisit this custom font thing… I’ve looked in the asset store and can’t find any font systems outside of the major GUI systems. It doesn’t help that the Asset Store search doesn’t appear to be working for me right now.
Do you have any suggestions of free font systems that will help with importing a custom font?
Have you tried something like this?
http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/
It might do the trick… Are you on Mac or PC?
Hmm… Would that work with Unity? I think Unity’s problem is the way it imports fonts. Creating the original font bitmap is pretty easy.
What was your solution in the end?
I’m Mac…
I’ve been trying to get bmfont working for several days now with no success. Does not run on my WinXP laptop and does not install on my MacPro. No response from their tech support.
Can anyone help me please? I’m trying to learn NGUI and it appears as if you need some sort of bitmap font creation program. I’m primarily on the Mac, but I do have an old PC laptop running WinXP. I prefer the Mac since that is where I’m running unity.
Thank in advance for any help.
Jeff
I ended up biting the bullet and putting down $20 for Font Setter — http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/171450-RELEASED-Font-Setter-Packer-(with-animated-sprites)
It’s pretty good, with a few caveats.
Hello, I have created a very simple tool for Unity , where you simply right-click on a Unity4 font and click “Convert To Unity3 Font” and it creates a Unity4 font, fully configured , bitmap font , with no rotation or flipped characters just like Unity3 did it. I made it in order to keep working in the exact same fashion I worked before this changed.
I am thinking wether I should sell this on the Asset Store. What do you guys think ? Would it be worth it ?
Thanks!
Does it generate all the correct spacing, position and rotation details from the original font file into a fontsettings file? There are a lot of little spacing details in a font… E.g., a ‘W’ has almost no padding space, where an ‘I’ would require a certain amount so it isn’t crowded with other letters. — How close did you get to gathering this?
If it works at least partially that would be incredible and no question you should sell it! Currently the only asset store solutions require users to draw container boxes around all the letters and individually specify the padding and spacing info, which is a lot of work.
If you do, I’d suggest not calling the tool ‘convert to unity 3 font’, as that might make it seem old. Call it ‘easy font customization’ or something similar, and show all the benefits of being able to edit in photoshop with directional effects. Good luck!