Another Question - Adding Custom Fonts To Dialog

[Phobos_Jugular]

I don’t know if anyone has ever done this but during the process of creating an old Akavirian pagoda I used Paint Shop Pro to inscribe a 'curse' using Paint Shop Pro and Wingdings instead of conventional fonts. The result looked pretty good and made me think that it would be very cool to have the resident lich speak in Wingdings in the dialog box. I tried this out and was defeated by the toolkit's ability to 'translate' Windings into English. As my wife would say "DARN and DOUBLE DARN!"

To continue - I’ve found some font packages on the internet – for example a Dwemer could speak in runes ( Robert’s Runes), an NPC ghost from 'Old Ehlnofey' could speak in Mayan Glyphs (archeologyfonts.com), and an Akavarian in either Wingdings or maybe ancient Chinese script. Akiriza's post a couple of weeks ago suggests that this might be possible and could it could be fun to create a dialog sequence where the Player couldn't understand what was said and have to make quest defining choices by guess or by golly.  

If anyone has done this please let me know either by this forum or email at ‘baumgartner@cox.net’and Vivec will bestow his blessings on you and your avatar!

[sassman]

I would imagine this would require some funky mumbo-jumbo magic using MGE or Morrowind Enhanced (if even that), because the way Morrowind handles text, only three font faces are ever actually loaded by the engine--the normal Text Font, Daedric, and a fancier (but otherwise readable) English text font.  Now, foreign language versions of Morrowind can override this--but only by COMPLETELY replacing the standard text fonts for everything, including stock NPCs.  Even the various books in Dwarven script essentially use a graphic image to present text that can't be read by the player.  Unfortunately, dialog boxes and message boxes only use--EVER--the same common English font that every NPC in stock Morrowind uses to speak to the player.  Having someone come in and converse in, say...Greek, would require you to translate their dialog into gibberish that could be displayed using the standard font(s).  That is to say, not an impossible task...but certainly a daunting one.

[Phobos_Jugular]

Sassman - even though the news is not what I wanted to hear I appreciate your response, especially your description of how the game engine handles the fonts. It makes one wonder why Bethesda bothered to include a fonts folder in the toolkit. I've wondered the same thing about the animations which I failed to understand when I tried to switch the 'hand.1st' graphic from 'Human' to 'Khajiit' for the Hand to Hand animation with the 'Animation' and 'Add Animation File' buttons in the NPC Window. But that's another question and the point is somewhat minor, especially since Bethesda didn't bother to do it for the khajiits in Oblivion and Skyrim.

[sassman]

No problem, I'm glad that at least helps you understand how things work in Morrowind.  Font handling is just one of very many limitations of the Morrowind Engine--limitations, I might add, that stem primarily from attempting to do so much in the earliest days of first-person gaming, with so little in the way of either experience or hardware support.

Morrowind, you understand, was well ahead of its time when the game was first published.  Although it has much to be desired--most of which are addressed by modern 3-d engines--in its debut, Morrowind offered unmatched gameplay, graphics rendering, and certainly immersion.

I definitely think it's that latter point that keeps so many of us modding for this old "Clunker" of a game year after year, when much newer games, including even Fallout and Oblivion, seem to fade eventually into...well, "Oblivion!"