Help with Upscaling fonts in FFIV Complete

[dpc76]

Hello all, long time lurker/new poster...

I've been working on creatin an HD texture replacement for the fuzzy low-res fonts in Final Fantasy IV complete edition. I'm completely new to working with textures, and was unable to find a lot of good resources/tutorials for fixing fonts in games, so I was hoping to get some tips from the community.

The game uses a font map like many. I tried to upscale the font map using programs like Waifu2x and ESRGAN but the results weren't very good (note: I'm new to these programs, so it may be my inexperience)

Instead, I've turned to using Photoshop to literally replace the text in the font map. This was time consuming and required a lot of trial and error, since small deviations can change the alignment of the fonts or make them look like garbage.

I've had some success, but I do end up with occasional artifacts in the text that I cannot seem to fix.


Does anyone have any tips for working with texture replacement for font maps in ppsspp? I know some may have done this for other texture packs - I'm curious how you accomplished it. Any information will be helpful - in turn, with some guidance, I may be able to complete this project for the texture replacement section. Thanks

[[Unknown]]

Reading this (although long) might help you get a better understanding:
https://forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=13556

At least the "Mist Cave" in the bottom right indicates to me that you made the "b" slightly wider, even if you didn't go beyond the original boundary of the pixel size. It's now sampling from the "b", which is why you get that line - at least, that's my guess. But, I'm not sure about the "e" or "u".

-[Unknown]

[dpc76]

(10-05-2021 05:02 AM)[Unknown] Wrote:  Reading this (although long) might help you get a better understanding:
https://forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=13556

At least the "Mist Cave" in the bottom right indicates to me that you made the "b" slightly wider, even if you didn't go beyond the original boundary of the pixel size. It's now sampling from the "b", which is why you get that line - at least, that's my guess. But, I'm not sure about the "e" or "u".

-[Unknown]

Thanks for the link. I just did a bunch of trial and error this week and I managed to keep the fonts looking clean by ensuring that all fonts were a hair smaller than the original so they fit within the exact footprint of the original (but not too small/narrow or the spacing ends up off). If I knew the name of the original font this would be much easier, but the results so far are looking decent.

[Nobletaran]

Can u share your textures please