The Font Topic...

[Motka]

  

18 hours ago, GillberTheRatRattusM said:

What I mean is the font used specifically for the icons in the radar or map of GTA IV. For example:

- Roman's Icon:

- Little Jacob's Icon: (ignore the sh*tty image glitch)

(images provided by the gta fandom wiki (https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page))

You get the jist of it. What is the font used specifically? I'm asking since I wanna make my own mission icons.

 

It seems the closest match would be Helvetica Neue LT Std 85 Heavy.

Edited April 8 by Motka

[Magic_Al]

I'm 99% sure the blurry "LIBERTY CITY" on the GTA IV in-game license plate was made with Garage Gothic Bold. Hard to prove by eye, due to resolution, but it fits the facts that Garage Gothic Bold is used on the GTA 1V and N1K0 collectable license plates, used in the game HUD for vehicle and street names and was used on the IV trailer countdown website.

The apparent differences in the letter C I think are mainly artifacts of bevel/emboss effects and compression.

 

 

 

 

(I'll post the HD license plate texture for modding when I get it looking properly embossed.)

[Graven]

3 hours ago, Magic_Al said:

I'm 99% sure the blurry "LIBERTY CITY" on the GTA IV in-game license plate was made with Garage Gothic Bold. Hard to prove by eye, due to resolution, but it fits the facts that Garage Gothic Bold is used on the GTA 1V and N1K0 collectable license plates, used in the game HUD for vehicle and street names and was used on the IV trailer countdown website.

The apparent differences in the letter C I think are mainly artifacts of bevel/emboss effects and compression.

It's close but the difference in the width of L character is too apparent. Emboss/Inner Bevel effect does not create artifact like that.

The C opening is also bigger in Garage Gothic, and if you inspect more you can see that in E letter the middle arm is considerably shorter.

The lower B hole is just a little bit higher also in the original.

 

 

The original is also thicker, so I'm voting for Compacta or something similar.

The emboss effect is too strong, probably it wouldn't be visible at all in the game if they had used realistic height with such low resolution? That makes the characters look rounder than they actually are.

I certainly wouldn't use Compacta for a license plate, there are better options like the ones they use de facto in real life. But try out and make a scale copy to low res to see how it looks.

 

[Magic_Al]

Thanks. I think you're right. And it's awful! Garage Gothic would at least be on someone's list of license plates fonts, even if it's not a good one, but Compacta would... not. I almost went with Industrial Gothic before I saw the numerals are different on the collectable plates.

 

The texture gets stretched to near the proper 2x1 proportions on most vehicles so it usually works out if you design to a not-squished 256x128 GTAV baseplate and squish it to 192x84 for a 1024x1024 vehshare.txd.

 

 

EDIT: I had to squish it to fit the original height, but looking at resulting differences with the original shape I've tried mixing in full-height elements including the rounded corners. Doing that seems to account for some of the original oddities like the shape of the C and the thickness of the E bar.

 

 

EDIT TOO: So this billboard might be the "highest resolution" image of a license plate in the game. Arial Narrow Bold? Let's ignore that. It does look like I need to fix my Serpentine though.

 

Edited July 15 by Magic_Al

[Graven]

On 7/12/2023 at 6:47 PM, Magic_Al said:

EDIT TOO: So this billboard might be the "highest resolution" image of a license plate in the game. Arial Narrow Bold? Let's ignore that. It does look like I need to fix my Serpentine though.

 

 

 

That's hard. Squinting your eyes (blurring) it's still quite impossible to say for sure if the R has the slight curve Arial has or not but that's the best bet, or Gothic 725.

 

btw, I would dig deeper into the game files if that's possible. Sometimes the fonts are there.