Custom fonts

It’s a pain to create a font script that generates a custom font with images; any time when we’ll get an efficient way to upload and use custom fonts? This would be VERY helpful and help with the diversity within games.

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I mean technically you can make a module that grabs a sprite-sheet and finds the location of each character, and just make several imagelabels for each letter. That’d be a ton of work though, so custom font uploading would be great. :stuck_out_tongue:

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That’s easy enough, but adding custom font size and many other properties a textlabel has (TextScaled, TextWrapped, etc.)
Is a bit more of a challenge.

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Duplicate thread. This has already been suggested.

In the meantime there’s this. http://developer.roblox.com/forum/look-at-this-cool-creation/5000-custom-font-service#53136

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Proper font rendering is a lot more complicated than just putting glyph images next to each other…

The font rendering in most computer games, including ROBLOX, is awful (I don’t know why). I’d be more interested in real font rendering (with the libraries provided by the operating system?) and Unicode support. Of course both would require a lot of work, if they are at all possible.

In any case, allowing users to upload custom fonts has no purpose. Almost all the fonts would be copyrighted and uploaded illegally. It’d be better if ROBLOX GUIs just had real font rendering and could use OpenType fonts, in which case ROBLOX could provide a larger number of fonts released under an adequate license.

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Using this reasoning, we shouldn’t be able to upload images, upload sounds, or even publish games…

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The future of ROBLOX font rendering is font assets (.ttf) and an asset id (instead of font enum - or rather in addition to font enum, probably with a “Custom” value in the enum itself…). This will not ship in the short term though.

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Using this reasoning, we shouldn’t be able to upload images, upload sounds, or even publish games…[/quote]

+1 Roblox operates under the safe harbor act as well. So really all content is fine until they receive a takedown request which they comply to. This is how all roblox user-generated content has operated.

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Please do not portray wrongly what I said. Users are capable of creating images, sounds, models and other assets themselves, and there are lots and lots of images and sounds available under licenses that permit distribution. This is not the case for fonts. There are more than enough fonts available under free licenses, but the number of fonts that exist is limited enough that there is no point in allowing users to upload them. Furthermore, typeface design is something very complicated and difficult that takes a lot of time and thought and cannot realistically be done by game developers who would like to use fonts in their games.

I know very well that ROBLOX is generally not liable for user content, and that they would probably not receive many takedown requests for this, even if redistributing most fonts that would be uploaded (almost all of which would be duplicates too…) are illegal to redistribute without a license. If that seems like an acceptable reason to you for allowing users to upload what is very likely to be copyrighted fonts, since ROBLOX won’t be liable for it anyway, then sure, let’s go with that.

TrueType or OpenType fonts are clearly the way to go, for sure! However I still don’t see the point of allowing users to upload font assets. There are less than a thousand fonts released under an appropriate license for use on ROBLOX that are likely to be uploaded, so ROBLOX could just offer a given number of fonts that could be better supported, and that would reduce complexity and eliminate duplicates while also solving copyright problems.

In any case, I don’t care much because I’m more interested in having proper font rendering. How likely is it that we’ll be able to set OpenType features?

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[quote] However I still don’t see the point of allowing users to upload font assets. There are less than a thousand fonts released under an appropriate license for use on ROBLOX that are likely to be uploaded, so ROBLOX could just offer a given number of fonts that could be better supported, and that would reduce complexity and eliminate duplicates while also solving copyright problems.
[/quote]

I honestly don’t see what the big deal is here.

With the proper moderation systems in place, this wouldn’t be an issue. When an image is deleted off the site and then reuploaded it is automatically rejected. Once one is approved, exact copies no longer have to be manually approved either. If the same thing applies, moderators wouldn’t even have to moderate these kinds of assets very often.

It is more than likely that someone will result in using one of the more commonly used fonts, which most likely is licensed under public usage. Plus it would be cool to see what kinds of fonts users make themselves on ROBLOX. Not that this would be very common, though it sure would be awesome.

I for one don’t see any flaws in this.

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[quote] However I still don’t see the point of allowing users to upload font assets. There are less than a thousand fonts released under an appropriate license for use on ROBLOX that are likely to be uploaded, so ROBLOX could just offer a given number of fonts that could be better supported, and that would reduce complexity and eliminate duplicates while also solving copyright problems.
[/quote]

I honestly don’t see what the big deal is here.

With the proper moderation systems in place, this wouldn’t be an issue. When an image is deleted off the site and then reuploaded it is automatically rejected. Once one is approved, exact copies no longer have to be manually approved either. If the same thing applies, moderators wouldn’t even have to moderate these kinds of assets very often.

It is more than likely that someone will result in using one of the more commonly used fonts, which most likely is licensed under public usage. Plus it would be cool to see what kinds of fonts users make themselves on ROBLOX. Not that this would be very common, though it sure would be awesome.

I for one don’t see any flaws in this.[/quote]

It isn’t just that re uploaded images get’s auto rejected, if the second user, changes the pixels, the mods have to review the image, no matter.

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[quote]
It isn’t just that re uploaded images get’s auto rejected, if the second user, changes the pixels, the mods have to review the image, no matter. [/quote]

This is true, though I don’t imagine that’ll happen too often? A .ttf type file probably wouldn’t be so obvious to some inexperienced guy, restricting him from using it… lol. This would probably be one of those more developer oriented features.

Besides, if someone really wanted to get a denied font through by constantly reuploading single pixel changes, they’re basically asking for a ban :P.

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Its been over 4 years since this was suggested. Any updates or plans regarding this feature?

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Maybe in 2020! I sure hope so.

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Custom fonts?

I have been thinking about some ways games might be able to create a better user interface, after some thought on the topic I would like to ask some of the developers on Roblox how they feel about this and how it could help them in the work/profession they do. Personally, I think this would help many UI designers, because a lot of them use different fonts which helps the UI look better in other programs, but Roblox is limited to certain fonts.

How could this help Roblox for the future?

  • Personally I believe this could help Roblox in many ways such as making more user interfaces feel more legit or even fit more in with the game theme.

Issues
Some issues that have been presented to me are the copyright issues. This could lead to legal battles, but if Roblox had moderators review the fonts, would that help in any way? Personally I feel like Roblox has or is working on a way to solve such issues, many issues could also play into affect with the testing Roblox has done on a possible “video system”

How do you feel about this?
Tell me about the ups and downs on the Topic, I would really like to hear what you think about the idea of players being able to add custom fonts into games they create.

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It’s been half a decade since this very basic feature was requested and we still only have 13 fonts to choose from, wyd roblox???

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They recently had a font survey here in case you missed it: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/more-fonts-fill-out-the-font-survey/683411

Looks like that’s coming soon™. No truly custom font feature though.

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UPDT: New feature ROBLOX added, fonts are now available in the ROBLOX creator marketplace though not uploadable yet.

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Well, thats one step in the right direction.

The next step is how the hell do you moderate fonts?

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Why would you need to moderate fonts?