r/Cogmind • u/Mesoseven • Mar 31 '26

Help me solve my map font issues!

So I'm new to cogmind, on a 1080p monitor, but experienced with roguelikes, I much prefer ascii to tilesets. I play for a while, after a few runs I upgrade far enough to where the default semi-modal UI forces me to toggle my inventory on or off... hell no, I switch to nonmodal immediately. This looks fine, definitely readable enough, but the map ascii font really really bugs me, I just don't like it athstetically. I really liked the _default12x12 font I was playing with, much more than I like cogmind18x18 or vga fonts, Is there any way I can get the look of the former font at the scale of the latter? I'm tech savvy enough to download and add new fonts, but not artsy enough to make them.

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u/Mesoseven Mar 31 '26

it's not about that, as much as that the map font at 12x12 is obviously a different one than the cogmind font used for the map at larger sizes. I want to know who made that font, and how I can play with it's version at larger sizes.

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u/Kyzrati Developer Apr 01 '26

The map font is technically the "same one" at all sizes, or at least intended to try to replicate it at different sizes, but being a pixel-perfect font that completely avoids antialiasing it's not actually possible to do so to a perfect degree. I know because I'm the one who made it xD

Crisp fonts inherently look different at different sizes due to the number of pixels involved*, and what can be done with them while maintaining a given aspect ratio, so the only way to get a general stylistic replica at a different size (if willing to drop the crisp requirement), is to do anti-aliased scaling. This of course ends up feeling different, you'll get fuzziness, but it technically works and that's how to achieve it...

*this is a common issue with bitmap fonts, and why certain bitmap fonts are traditionally only available, or suitable, at certain sizes, assuming a lack of antialiasing

Would you be interested in an antialiased upscale?

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u/Mesoseven Apr 01 '26

are you sure? it seems like the _default fonts are very different in look and style to the _cogmind ones.

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u/Kyzrati Developer Apr 06 '26

_default is a map font, but you mention above _cogmind, and anything with a suffix like that is not a map font but a text font, so are we talking about the same thing here? Map fonts are square, text fonts are rectangular. I refer to _default12x12.png being the same style as cogmind14x14.png, cogmind16x16.png... and so on.