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."

[movra]

The difference in sharpness is clearly demonstrated regardless of imgur's compression.

[Jodien37]

Unfortunately the blurry font issue is a huge deal breaker in this game. It is really horrible right now and I couldn't stand it 5 minutes into the game. The game is really unplayable as it is. Hope they will release a fix as soon as possible. Until that time there is no point playing this game.

[Haevion]

It seems that there were workarounds for a similar matter with Unity found a few months ago: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1226551/ui-text-is-blurred-unity-535f.html

Unfortunately I don't know what to do with them. Can anyone do something with that?

[Sanquiz]

Why i cant see the blurry on the screenshots you people put here?

[Haevion]

Crashed, did you make progress on this matter? Can you perhaps share your results? I really want to enjoy this game. :)

[Crashed]

Sorry no progress. 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.

[Haevion]

Thanks so much! Doesn't fix the whole UI, but it fixes the dialogue window which is perfectly fine for me since I am able to read the text now. :)

[makealive1985]

Wow thnx Crashed! This solves about 95% of my blurry text issues!

[Mich-666]

Thanks Crashed! You basically fixed my no.1 annoyance with the game! I can finally play at ease now :)

This topic should be pinned or the link to fix put into QA section until they fix it by themselves.

[waltc]

Originally posted by Sanquiz:

Why i cant see the blurry on the screenshots you people put here?

It's possible the blurriness is caused by post processing, in which case it would show up on the screen but not necessarily in the screenshot. I see no way to adjust post processing in the game to play with this (as it is adjustable in the Witcher 3, for example.)

[Captain Camper]

I've added info about Crashed's "partial fix" to the original thread post, so that it can get more visibility for people who want to try it out.

[Crashed]

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.

[Captain Camper]

Updated the original thread post to contain the non-Windows partial fix information.

[Air]

Originally posted by Crashed:

I made a little bit of progress:

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

This demonstrates the issue perfectly - going to try the unofficial patch now. Hope this makes it on the first official patch! This is the first bad thing I noticed about the game.

[agris]

Originally posted by sear:

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.

Just curious, what were the issues that enabling pixel perfect rendering introduced?

for those that missed it, original flags that cause blurry text: http://i.imgur.com/U4XvxdL.png
modified render settings to remove it: http://i.imgur.com/FQ9tJwA.png

other than 'pixelperfect' being set to 'False' in the blurry text example, it also appears that the UI is set to scale with the screen size and that the internal rendering of the scene is supersampled (i.e. 3840 x 2160) as compared to the crisp text. The crisp text version has pixelperfect set to True, the UI size is fixed and the game is rendered at the output resolution of 1920x1080.

FWIW, the patch linked above should also increase performance if it disables supersampling (the 3840x2160 bit).