Nameplate - Examples

Without the plugin

A snippet from a screenshot of Final Fantasy XI. The text "Geomancer", "Legionless Draugar" and "Miss!" appear stretched out at 21:9 resolution.

With the plugin

A snippet from a screenshot of Final Fantasy XI. The text "Geomancer", "Legionless Draugar" and "Miss!" are now drawn with the same aspect ratio as the game's font texture, even at 21:9 resolution.

The base font texture used by the game

A font atlas texture extracted from a recent version of Final Fantasy XI. The texture is primarily used for drawing the nameplate and on-screen damage numbers. The font texture also gets used in a few other places, such as the character list on the character selector screen.

If you're really curious... as far as I can tell, the original font from the PlayStation 2 era in the upper left is an Arial-based font. The newer, larger version looks like Helvetica Neue Condensed Medium Italic, or at least something close to it. The most obvious difference is the little tail of the 'a' in the larger font.

But...

The use of a condensed font was most likely not their intended choice, but a workaround. Given that they would have been assuming a 4:3 resolution ratio, here's the font texture scaled down to 256x192.

A font atlas texture extracted from a recent version of Final Fantasy XI. The texture is primarily used for drawing the nameplate and on-screen damage numbers. The font texture also gets used in a few other places, such as the character list on the character selector screen. This texture has been squashed down to 256x192 pixels in size.

But the implementation is incorrect. You stretch the width naïvely, and you end up stretching the space between letters as well. With the way things are currently implemented in the game client, you end up with something like this at a 4:3 resolution.

A font atlas texture extracted from a recent version of Final Fantasy XI. The texture is primarily used for drawing the nameplate and on-screen damage numbers. The font texture also gets used in a few other places, such as the character list on the character selector screen. This texture has been stretched to 341x256 pixles in size.

Or this, at a 21:9 resolution.

A font atlas texture extracted from a recent version of Final Fantasy XI. The texture is primarily used for drawing the nameplate and on-screen damage numbers. The font texture also gets used in a few other places, such as the character list on the character selector screen. This texture has been stretched to 597x256 pixels.

So...

The Nameplate plugin forces the texture to render with a 1:1 aspect ratio. Maybe I'll add a squash mode one day...

For more information

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