Why is the text blurry in some cases?

[Captain Camper]

Not sure if anyone else gets this, but the text appears to be blurry to me when playing the game. It isn't consistently blurry, as some text (even with the exact same font) looks blurry and just a line below or above the text will be less blurry.

When I say blurry, I mean it is still readable, but just not as crisp as I expect the text should be. I'm running in 1920 by 1080 at 120hz.


EDIT:

A dev has responded to this on page 2 of the thread:

"Thanks for letting us know. We're aware of this behavior - this is not really a new issue with Unity, many games using UGUI seem to exhibit it.

Prior to release we weren't able to find an ideal solution that didn't also introduce other issues. We'll investigate our options further for future updates."


EDIT 2:

A user named Crashed has helped out by contributing a partial fix that mitigates some of the blurry text problems. This is not an official fix, so if you use it, you do so at your own risk. Here is a quote from Crashed on page 5 of the thread:

"I've been doing a little work on a generic plugin system for Torment, it's in a sorry state but hopefully works well enough that you folks could use it for fixing the blurry text.

https://mega.nz/#F!lhExGbQT!0m_qre0pZ8mzZZrWdTGvMw

Click 'Download as ZIP' in the root dir.
Windows only, 64bit, source included for the adventurous. Take a crack at fixing the text if you wish."

So far the feedback has been positive for the fix, though I haven't tested it myself. If this tool ever sees another update, I'll try to add any relevant info to this edit.


EDIT 3:

Crashed has created a non-Windows version of his partial fix. Quote from his message on page 5:

"I was not happy about providing a release without accommodating our non-Windows brethren, so I've created an alternative method.

This is a tool that will patch one of the game's managed assemblies to change how it renders text, it still does not improve the tooltip text situation and it does not seem to produce text as good as the plugin method but it is better than default.

Download: https://paste.pound-python.org/show/lsiX4m0Ge0fAzLzvi11U/
Requires a python interpreter, should work with 2.6+ but only tested on python 3.6.

Locate Assembly-CSharp-firstpass.dll in path_to_torment/TidesOfNumenera_Data/Managed/ and make a backup of this file. The tool will overwrite it. At the bottom of the script edit the filename variable to this fully qualified path, or alternatively make a copy in the same dir as the script. `python patch.py` will patch this file, now you can run Torment and hopefully text is a little easier on the eyes.

I have only tested this locally on a Windows machine, and working under the assumption that we have identical or near-identical assemblies. For the technical: this patches Candlelight.UI.HyperText.pixelsPerUnit to return a constant 1.0, instead of calculating a value based on canvas.scaleFactor."

[ZoSo]

Sidonas の投稿を引用：

Kaeltis の投稿を引用：

I noticed the same issue, for example the Merchant's name is mostly blurry, but I can make it clear by moving the camera a couple of pixels. For a game which is very much based on ready text, this is a huge problem!

Blurry: https://vgy.me/KjNdXC.png
Clear: https://vgy.me/nHLLre.png

oook, i can see now, with the comparison...looks more like a sharpness settings issue you should maybe be able to correct through nvidia control panel or possibly other settings concerning display.

It's actually both. If you have the game with high AA settings you get blurryness, along with the other blurryness. The game probably uses FXAA.

[Sidonus]

Jacksknife の投稿を引用：

Crashed の投稿を引用：

I dug a little bit into the inner workings of Torment, good god do I despise Unity. From what I gather, from what little I know of Unity, Torment uses Candlelight.UI which is backed by Unity's UI.Text and it does not appear to use Text Mesh Pro. I don't know if that's a good thing or bad. But going off a tip from stackoverflow, repositioning the objects containing text makes a subtle difference to the sharpness of the text. Simply rounding the position of the containing object has no effect, they are likely already truncated to ints. But if we shift their x position a few times we can get crisper text sometimes.

Exhibit A (blurry text): http://i.imgur.com/IYrPh6k.png
Exhibit B (sharper but appears to still be blurry text): http://i.imgur.com/SauB1fe.png

I'm no expert, but that's some damn surprising behaviour. This may very well be an off-by-half-a-texel issue, but applying the fix to the containing object would not solve it so instead it probably needs to be applied to each glyph.

A and B looks the same on my rig...

I'm no expert but maybe it is hardware related...

wow...eeeyeah...me too man
these look absolutely identical on my PC. tinker with settings..

[Captain Camper]

For those immediately jumping on the anti-alias conclusion without reading this whole thread, the anti-alias settings have already been disabled as a test and this has no impact on the text clarity.

This would also be a good time to alert new readers jumping to the end of this thread that a dev has already commented as this being a known issue, and that inXile is investigating what can be done.

EDIT:

I've updated the first post of this thread to contain the dev response, so that people can see it immediately when first opening the thread.

[ZoSo]

I said about AA because i tested it and the AA causes blurryness. I disabled it in-game and forced it to x8 with the Nvidia Panel for a better result.

[Crashed]

If you cannot see the difference you might be too far from your display or have a poorly calibrated monitor [1]. You can attempt to align the text and then do an image diff and that will reveal that yes in fact there is a difference when there should not be.

A little more digging around, and I found that the text elements are not aligned to pixel boundaries and do indeed have fractional components despite my previous assertion. The entire UI is laid out and setup for a 4k monitor (3840x2160), then I think scaling is applied to positions and sizes to cut it down to smaller screens like 1920x1080 and the positions are not rounded and no effort is made to align glyphs to pixel positions.

If anyone has a compatible graphics card, I'd suggest trying to enable 'virtual super resolution' as AMD call it and set it to exactly 4k. If it works like I think then it will render at 4k then downscale to your native screen size and this should in theory give you good results.

I've been attempting a fix that works like so:

• Modify all inXile.UI canvases and canvas scalers to use pixel perfect rendering mode
  
• Change reference resolution to native resolution instead of 4k
  
• Attempt to reposition every UI element and resize them, possibly having to change font sizes as well since the defaults are for 4k and absolutely gigantic

The last bullet point is where I'm stuck since I don't know what the hell I'm doing with Unity, there doesn't seem to be a way to resize these things for one as RectTransform rects are readonly. Also changing an element's world space position will modify its local position and I don't know how the heck to place something exactly where I want.

Edit:
[1] Eliminate or play with your display's overscan setting, I've seen too many displays with overscan and it just makes text ugly. If you've never seen clear crisp text ever, then you might think that Torment's poor text rendering is normal.

[Haevion]

Really looking forward to this issue being adressed. Played for one hour and got a headache. It wouldn't be that much of an issue if the text was all blurry in the same way, but the blurriness differs even at the beginning to the end of a sentence.

[movra]

Crashed の投稿を引用：

If anyone has a compatible graphics card, I'd suggest trying to enable 'virtual super resolution' as AMD call it and set it to exactly 4k. If it works like I think then it will render at 4k then downscale to your native screen size and this should in theory give you good results.

That also works with a NVidia GPU using DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution). First enable the DSR factor 4.00x. Then change the display resolution to that one.

Here a screenshot taken at 3840 x 2400 DSR on a 1920 x 1200 display.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/156902491433640562/51B2658FA47E8B42AF28EDD08383DFDF3C7D4FED/

Much sharper compared to native 1920 x 1200:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/156902400679767213/9EC3763964BBFB02D628B87E3AD98A02FB44DF1E/

Beware, rendering at 4x may incur a hefty performance hit on your GPU.

Crashed の投稿を引用：

I've been attempting a fix that works like so:

• Modify all inXile.UI canvases and canvas scalers to use pixel perfect rendering mode
  
• Change reference resolution to native resolution instead of 4k
  
• Attempt to reposition every UI element and resize them, possibly having to change font sizes as well since the defaults are for 4k and absolutely gigantic

I'd try approaching it from the other side, backporting some classes from Unity 5.6 into the Unity 5.4.1 dlls. But maybe then I'd also get stuck at the 3rd bullet.

Try these instead of rect.x:
RectTransform.anchoredPosition
RectTransform.offsetMin
RectTransform.offsetMax

[Crashed]

Looks promising but it may very well be a fluke, unfortunately your test didn't hit the exact details I was looking for.

Need someone with preferably a native max resolution 1920x1080 display, and can render using 'virtual resolution' at exactly 3840x2160 (not 3840x2400). For AMD cards this needs GCN 2nd gen or newer, sadly I only have 1st gen. Then take upload three images: one at 1920x1080, one at 3840x2160 virtual resolution, then take that 3840x2160 image and scale it down 50% to 1920x1080 in an image editor while taking care to favour high quality rather than smaller file sizes. That third image that was scaled down should look (maybe tremendously) better than the first.

The reason for 3840x2160 is this is the 'reference resolution' set in Torment, which is also presumably the resolution they used when laying out the UI elements and 3840x2160 divides into 1920x1080 cleanly.

[movra]

I'm not sure there is a UI difference between 1920x1080 and 1920x1200. Just the top and bottom of the screen are cut-off and the UI elements are anchored relative to the sides.

Here, I've made 3 screenshots including one with DSR:

Rendering at 1920x1080

Rendering at 1920x1200

Rendering at 3840x2400

Depending on your browser: open all 3 in separate tabs, toggle fullscreen with F11. That should demonstrate the difference clearly on a 1920x1200 display.

Dialog example 1920x1200 vs 3840x2400
http://i.imgur.com/OsT5pIN.jpg

[Ferien auf dem Innenhof]

Wow, I wish it would display the text as in the 3840 screenshot, if watched at at 100%. Perfect sharpness, perfect AA.

[indyxt]

Damn, so to play it properly without my eyes bleeding I need either 4k display or GPU powerful enough to downscale from 4k to my native res? WTF, devs?!
If I could I'd refund right now.
***
As it turns out I can refund... Well, see you on sale, devs. Sadly.

[Ferien auf dem Innenhof]

movra の投稿を引用：

That also works with a NVidia GPU using DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution). First enable the DSR factor 4.00x. Then change the display resolution to that one.

In NVidia Control panel, that is? I think I do not have it... GTX970 here.

[Crashed]

movra の投稿を引用：

Dialog example 1920x1200 vs 3840x2400
http://i.imgur.com/OsT5pIN.jpg

Despite the compression artifacts, this one's really good. The text can look great, instead we're getting the top which looks like an old Mothers Against Drunk Driving ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrhV3QTkNyw

I need to get my hands on a 4k display so I can finally make it passed the dome without calling it quits.

[Nupfi]

Got the same problem. Text is blurry.

[Crashed]

I made a little bit of progress:

Default: http://i.imgur.com/U4XvxdL.png
Modified: http://i.imgur.com/FQ9tJwA.png

Tweaking just a few parameters yields sharper text in conversations but it does introduce new artifacts, namely the disconnect near the top-right corner of the dialog box and the health bar appearing not quite full. In the options menu some text is sharper while others are slightly worse so this is not a good fix.

I'm going to try playing like this with hotkeys for default and modified and seeing if it improves text most of the time, if so then I'll probably package up the tool and release it for you folks.

Edit:
Unfortunately imgur will compress your uploaded images if you do not create an account and change a setting. Sigh.