Some ingame text slightly blurry

[Hetulik]

I'm noticing a couple items of text in the game are blurry. In the attached screenshot particularly the yellow text under the "Game Paused" area in the upper middle, the yellow text above the bottom left information window, and the white monetary amounts in the upper right corner. The other text shows up fine, so this is limited to just a few areas of text. And the text isn't completely blurry, but it is no where near as sharp as i'd like to see it.

I do run my computer on 1920 by 1080 on a laptop. But I never remember noticing problems before or having any complaints about the text in Distant Worlds. These areas of text seemed to show up fine before in Legends, but it has been some months since I played last.

Am I the only one seeing this, so might this be an issue with my computer? Or is this a new feature of Shadows? Is there anything I can do so this text can be made more sharp? Or can this text be made to display as it was in Legends? This is more of an annoyance than a bug.

Thanks in advance. Great game! Definitely the best on the market.
Regards,

[elliotg]

Hi Hetulik

Glad you're enjoying the game.

The graphics engine in Shadows has changed from Legends, so some things will look a little different.

However that text does look abnormal - it's blurrier than I've seen for Shadows on any other system.

You may be able to fine-tune your display settings - video card manufacturers often provide tools for this.

Thanks
Elliot

[MedievalNerd]

Howdy,

Sorry for bringing this post back to life from the dead. But I'm really curious as to what are the in-game options available to tweak resolution, display, maybe a windowed mode?

I fail to see how the solution to this problem should rest solely to be resolved by third party software, or tweaking your video card settings. I did some changes to the AA, forcing on/of, and yet there is seemingly no change in the blurriness at all. I run a dual monitor setup, and the blurriness is as prominent on my 1920x1080 monitor than it is on my 1600x900 monitor.

It'd be nice to get a little bit more in-depth support for an 85$ game (counting all the expansions).

I was actually floored to see that there are actually no display settings whatsoever in the game, unless I'm missing something?

Totally love the premise of the game, but this blurry text issue is a total eyestrain, and considering how information heavy the game is, it's totally putting a huge negative on the experience as a whole. I'm hoping there is an actual remedy to this issue, for it's quite disconcerting.

Thanks in advance,

[michaelm75au]

I also have seen the "fuzzy" text in the game, but I could swear that it was much clear in the earlier patches of Shadows.

Loaded older patch are it is fuzzy so must have been like that always for Shadow

[btd64]

Im running shadows on a 7 year old tower and the only issue i have is a slow responds to clicking an item. but I expect that on this machine. Have not seen the blurryness though. Hope a solution is found for you.[:)]
Cheers

[Erik Rutins]

One question for you all is what your various Windows font settings are. It's possible there could be some interaction. We're not seeing the blurry text on our systems here. In the screenshot in the first post, the yellow text is much less clear than what we see.

The best way to figure this out is for someone experiencing the issue to experiment with their Windows and graphics driver settings to see if they can figure out what may be causing this issue.

Regards,

- Erik

[flight2q]

I found that going through the ClearType fonts setup sequence again paid off some. Previously I had always selected the clearest looking choice, but I tried instead always choosing the biggest and boldest looking choice. Big and bold is what this game likes.

In theory these font problems would be solved by increasing display resolution, but the game is not designed to run at your display's native resolution unless your monitor is actually an HDTV on your desk.

[MedievalNerd]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

One question for you all is what your various Windows font settings are. It's possible there could be some interaction. We're not seeing the blurry text on our systems here. In the screenshot in the first post, the yellow text is much less clear than what we see.

The best way to figure this out is for someone experiencing the issue to experiment with their Windows and graphics driver settings to see if they can figure out what may be causing this issue.

Regards,

- Erik

Thanks for the reply. Although I'd hope you could provide a little bit more detail as what do you mean by graphics driver settings exactly. (AA/AF?) Can you share us some information on these said system with no blurry text? What resolution are you using, what are your graphical settings? What is the supposed target resolution for this game? Please provide us some information to work with.

With all due respect it'd be nice to see someone from Matrixgames investigate this further rather than place the burden solely on the customers and making vague allegations to tweak font/graphical settings. You are designing on PC, it's bound to have rare issues that you can't easily reproduce on the PC you are currently using. Please work with us on this.

I don't have time during the week, but this weekend I'll provide a series of screenshots using various settings to showcase the issue more. But as I mentioned in my previous reply. I've already recalibrated Clear Type on both my monitors with seemingly no visible improvement overall. Additionally, the more problematic tool tips do not react whatsoever to the clear type settings, which leads to believe that it's not actual font, so perhaps embedded image/graphical text?

And in terms of fiddling with Nvidia Display settings, I wasn't able to see any settings which impacted the clarity of the text. Which is why I previously asked to which settings are you referring to.

Repeating myself, but I tried this on both a 1600x900 and 1920x1080 monitors. Barely any difference in clarify between them.

Loving the game but this obscure text issue is quite annoying, any plans in implementing any kind of scaling for fonts or perhaps a windowed mode? I'm sure that if you could have it in windowed mode you could play with the window size and find a sweet spot in which the text isn't blurry, scaling issue?

I'm hoping we can get to the bottom of this, because the is nothing more annoying than to be enjoying the game, only to get a pop up, or look at a statistic screen to then have to lean towards the monitor or find some weird angle to try and be able to read the text.

Also, random thought. I see that by default the game is displaying at 50 FPS. Is it that the default refresh rate is set to 50hz? Refresh issue maybe? Grasping at straws.

[Erik Rutins]

Hi MedievalNord,

We have test systems with both ATI and nVidia graphics cards and we are unable to reproduce the blurry text issue with any settings we've tried so far - this was based on testing when this first came up. I can say also that on our clean systems, Windows and the graphics driver are at the default settings and they have no issues with the text looking like this either.

I'm not sure what to suggest specifically given that we don't know what could cause this except in a very general sense. If you have time to experiment, please do so. I can say that we're taking another look at it here, but we don't have anything specific to add at this time.

Based on the screenshot above, it's only some of the text that is blurry, not all - so my assumption is that this is not a resolution/monitor scaling issue. If you are running in a scaled resolution that can certainly cause this effect, but that would affect all the text and not just some.

Regards,

- Erik

[Canute0]

Repeating myself, but I tried this on both a 1600x900 and 1920x1080 monitors. Barely any difference in clarify between them.

Can you please give more details on this. ?
What Windows resolution do you use one what monitor, or did you use allways the same resolution for all monitors ?

The background are, the text/grafik looks best/sharp when the windows/game resolution is the same like the monitor (special on LCD and other flatscreen) . When you use a different resoltion then the monitor got, because you want a larger text/font you got the effect that the monitor transform 1 pixel into 1.5 pixel but since the monitor can't display 0.5 pixel you can have this blur effect.

[MedievalNerd]

ORIGINAL: Canute

Repeating myself, but I tried this on both a 1600x900 and 1920x1080 monitors. Barely any difference in clarify between them.

Can you please give more details on this. ?
What Windows resolution do you use one what monitor, or did you use allways the same resolution for all monitors ?

The background are, the text/grafik looks best/sharp when the windows/game resolution is the same like the monitor (special on LCD and other flatscreen) . When you use a different resoltion then the monitor got, because you want a larger text/font you got the effect that the monitor transform 1 pixel into 1.5 pixel but since the monitor can't display 0.5 pixel you can have this blur effect.

The resolution I mentioned for the monitors is their native resolution. I understand the issues that you describe, which is why I asked in one of my post what is the intended resolution for the game?

If it is the case that the game is meant to be X resolution, while my monitors are Y resolution, if we could play the game in windowed mode, then it could keep the 1x1 pixel representation without the need of stretching.

Didn't get answers to those questions.

I'll take some time this weekend and gather a series of screenshots.

[Erik Rutins]

The game has no intended resolution, it will scale to whatever resolution you are using. The only concern would be if your monitor is running at something other than its native resolution or if your video card is doing some kind of scaling.

Regards,

- Erik

[Hetulik]

As the original poster of this thread I can say that I've never been able to resolve this issue. I'm sad to say I put the game aside in hopes that a later patch would resolve the problem.

I've tried everything on my computer that I can think of. I updated my NVIDIA graphics drivers to the latest version (GeForce 320.49). I have a GeForce GT 540M. My computer defaults to 125% text size, and I've tried 100% and 150%. Also I've tried multiple screen resolutions. I played around with other settings that were available in the NVIDIA control panel (edge enhancement, noise reduction, etc.) to be tweaked and wasn't able to resolve the issue. I have a pretty standard Dell XPS L502X laptop running windows 7. I'm an average user that doesn't play too many graphics oriented games so never tweaked or changed any of the factory default settings on this laptop.

I'm running under my native resolution, and do not believe any scaling is taking place. I've never had problems in any other game I've played.

>>You may be able to fine-tune your display settings - video card manufacturers often provide tools for this.

Can you suggest any specific steps that I should try? I wasn't able to find a way to change any default font style types.

Thanks,
Hetulik

[Canute0]

Again the Question:
What resolution got the monitor and what resolution do you use at windows ?

[flight2q]

That's a 1080p native screen he has, but only 15 inches. That's 147 ppi. It's hopeless to try to run this game at 1080p on that laptop. 540p would be great resolution for that screen size, but iirc game does not support below 1366x768.

[Canute0]

Dell XPS L502X 15,6-Zoll HDready Display (1366 x 768 Pixel)

OK, these 1366x768 are the resolution you should use on Windows desktop too, thats the resolution the grafic and text look best/sharp not only at DW.
Please try it out. When the text still blur at this resolution there is maybe another problem. Sure 1366 x 768 isn't much room to view anything, but it is just a small Laptop.

My computer defaults to 125% text size, and I've tried 100% and 150%

Like you notice, that only affect windows font, not any game font.

Repeating myself, but I tried this on both a 1600x900 and 1920x1080 monitors. Barely any difference in clarify between them.

When you use external monitors, you should change the windows desktop to the resolution of the monitor ! Special with LCD/flatscreen monitor !

[MedievalNerd]

ORIGINAL: Canute

Dell XPS L502X 15,6-Zoll HDready Display (1366 x 768 Pixel)

OK, these 1366x768 are the resolution you should use on Windows desktop too, thats the resolution the grafic and text look best/sharp not only at DW.
Please try it out. When the text still blur at this resolution there is maybe another problem. Sure 1366 x 768 isn't much room to view anything, but it is just a small Laptop.

My computer defaults to 125% text size, and I've tried 100% and 150%

Like you notice, that only affect windows font, not any game font.

Repeating myself, but I tried this on both a 1600x900 and 1920x1080 monitors. Barely any difference in clarify between them.

When you use external monitors, you should change the windows desktop to the resolution of the monitor ! Special with LCD/flatscreen monitor !

You missed my reply I believe. I always run my monitors on their native resolution. I'll say it at length, my 1600 x 900 monitor is set at 1600 x 900 in windows, and my 1920 x 1080 monitor is set to 1920 x 1080 in windows.

Any PC gamer worth his salt will always have it set properly. Who would even want to run his/her monitor at anything else other than the native resolution. It would be like having your monitor set to the wrong refresh rate, very unpleasant for the eyes on some areas of the screen.

I didn't check the font size if it had an impact on the game, but I did notice that only certain text would react to Clear Type setting being turned on/off. Strangely enough only the said blurry text would remain unchanged by toggling that setting on/off. The most prominent blurry text is the pop up tool tips that appear in the diplomacy screen. Those portions of text truly looks as if they are images which are being scaled up/down.

Sadly as the Erik mentioned, I cannot see any changes (positive or negative) by messing with any setting from my Video Card Control panel. AA/AF/AO all have zero impact on the visibility of the text at all.

It's kind of crappy in the end, Matrix can't really do anything about it, and so we are stuck with a partially blurry game. If I'd buy a book and it turn out that 1 of the pages were blurry, I wouldn't want to keep that book, or want a discount on it. At the end price the game comes up to, you'd expect to be able to see everything clear as it should be.

[Hetulik]

That is correct, I'm using a 15 inch laptop monitor at 1920x1080 with the Dell I have. That is my native resolution as well.

I tried reducing to 1366 x 768 and the blurriness still occurs. (and DW doesn't look good at all)

Thanks flight2q for the suggestion on how to change my cleartype text fonts. This unfortunately didn't work either. I tried it with both on and off. I played with calibrating the color as well and that didn't do anything either.

I share your disappointment MedievalNerd - with about ~25% of the text in the game very blurry and difficult to read it makes the game almost unplayable.

Matrix Developers: I can't help but wonder is there something different about certain types of text you're using in Distant Worlds? As I mentioned most of the text looks fine, but there are certain areas of text that are extremely blurry. For example in the screenshot I attached. The "Press Spacebar or Pause key to resume" is very blurry, as is the "Exploration ships..." text at the bottom left, as is the text in the very upper right. Planet names are blurry as well, but most of the other text on the main screen looks reasonably good. Would it help if I attached more screenshots of what I'm seeing throughout the game so you can narrow down a potential difference with those specific messages/text and that might help you find a code change you can make to resolve the issue?

Thanks again for your help (and everyone else's) tracking this down,
Regards,
Hetulik

[Hetulik]

Its interesting, if I zoom in at 600% on the blurry text in my screenshot some interesting patterns appear. All text clearly is displayed. (this is good) Text is not missing. But there are 2 shades of yellow being used by Distant Worlds. For example the right side of the "P" in the word "Press" is a lighter shade of yellow. The bottom right parts of the two "s" in the word "Press" are a lighter shade of yellow. If the text was all the brighter shade of yellow it would look fine on my screen. I can't imagine this lighter shading on certain parts of some letters is due to a video card issue.

For folks where distant worlds is displaying fine are you seeing different shades of yellow in that text similar to what I'm seeing?

MedievalNerd is this also what you're seeing as well?

Matrix: I can't believe something like this isn't programmatic. The bottom right/ right side of all this text is shaded. And that has to be fixable?

Thanks

[flight2q]

I don't recall seeing that behavior in the spacebar/pause text. I did see that behavior in the cashflow/bonusincome text in the upper right (right side of each digit was faded). I figured it was some poor stylization choice with the font, but (and?) it was cured by adjusting cleartype for me iirc (biggest and boldest choices, not the clearest). As for the planet names, they come into focus when they are zoomed in on. The font does not seem to be very good at adjusting to different display sizes/zoom.