Dragonflight Alpha - Slug Library, Diablo IV Quarterly Update - August 2022

[Daronokk]

The text is less bold in the slug version (guessing that's because it's the actual font where the current version has mild blurring/bleeding as it renders, making it seem larger than it actually is) but it's still consistent when close. Dunno how anyone can pretend that's not an upgrade.

The first two rows look better in the original form. Some of the letters gets cut off in the slug version. Just look at the "m" in Crimson in the bottom left. Original is way better.

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Yep, it's a little hard to see because of the JPEG artifacting, but WoW has notorious font readability issues for NPC names and the like at a distance. This is a huge improvement you will notice in game.

If you have such bad eyes you shouldn't be playing games on a screen in close range and should go outside to actually train your eyes for far distance.

[MarkTheMadMad]

agreed. They look different but equally bad.

Glad i am not the only one not noticing any difference here? I think i need glasses lol

[Dasn]

They both look equally bad. Regular version the text in the back gets jagged while in the slug version it's the ones in the front.

It's not an upgrade in any way, shape or form.

get your eyes checked

[huth]

"Premium" ok bye

If you read the actual announcements, they are very specific that the only "premium" content available will be cosmetics. Anything actually affecting gameplay will only be available through gameplay.


The comparison screenshots are way to poor quality to be useful.

[Drench]

@chaub why would you upload the comparison in like 20% jpeg quality?

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They both look equally bad. Regular version the text in the back gets jagged while in the slug version it's the ones in the front.

It's not an upgrade in any way, shape or form.

It is in game. The people who run the site decided to upload the comparison in the worst possible quality lol.
You can't argue because using a vector graphic is always gonna be infinitely better.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

The Slug library does nothing to fix the readability issues of the font itself, sadly. Arial Narrow and lowercase R is a terrible combination.

[Ringthane]

The first two rows look better in the original form. Some of the letters gets cut off in the slug version. Just look at the "m" in Crimson in the bottom left. Original is way better.

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If you have such bad eyes you shouldn't be playing games on a screen in close range and should go outside to actually train your eyes for far distance.

You can train your eyes? Gee, I wonder if all the people who wear glasses knew that. You may have single-handedly put ophthalmologists out of business.

[Cracked]

You can't argue because using a vector graphic is always gonna be infinitely better.

Properly antialiased texture rendering will look virtually identical, it's just that it's a pretty hard problem to solve if you hadn't considered it from the getgo, because you need to carefully select font size for the number of pixels it will occupy on the screen. Usually the opposite would be problematic - rendering larger glyphs than stored textures, you simply lost the information at that point. The saving grace of this library is that it allows you to get all of that complexity wrong and still have a nice looking result. Too bad it's paid, I would like to support it inside my text renderer.

[Lumy]

@chaub why would you upload the comparison in like 20% jpeg quality?

It is in game. The people who run the site decided to upload the comparison in the worst possible quality lol.
You can't argue because using a vector graphic is always gonna be infinitely better.

The images have been uploaded to the website without any editing, and the thumbnails were cropped with a 1px border and exported at max quality. I'm not sure what "20% quality" you're talking about.

Regardless of this, I have increased the graphics quality from 7 to 10, changed the screenshotQuality cvar from 3 (the default) to 10 (max) and retook the screenshots (which are already live in the post). Other settings were already on max, with the exception of Ray Traced Shadows which is disabled.

Top images are the original ones, and bottom images are the new ones. As you can see, in-game settings related to quality don't seem to affect the rendering of the text. At least not on my screen resolution.

[Polybius]

You can tell better with Evoker floating icons.

[zenyatta]

The font is better but we aren't going from a studio in the slums to a mansion or anything. Slightly better, but nowhere near enough to start letting loose the balloons and confetti.

[Kumorii]

It's wild to me people can't see the difference on the texts.

Same as when people can't notice the difference between 30 or 60fps.
Quite interesting how we perceive things differently.
Would love to be able to see the world through someone elses eyes.

[Mamut]

How generous of them considering the game costs 60 dollars.

I'm totally okay with cosmetic only shop and battle pass as long as the seassons are interesting like leagues in PoE and not some crap like"here you have two goblins instead of one" like in D3. I even think it's a good thing for the game because if the cash is flowing from cosmetics then theres bigger chance that the game will be developed for a long time and not abandoned like D3.

And be realistic, today sales only from boxes will not cover developing new content (seasson content) for a long time because they are not earning all those moneys from boxes only to spend everything later to keep the game alive.

And instead of rushed expansions every year I prefer smaller updates every 3 months that keep the game fresh.

[Cracked]

The images have been uploaded to the website without any editing, and the thumbnails were cropped with a 1px border and exported at max quality. I'm not sure what "20% quality" you're talking about.

Regardless of this, I have increased the graphics quality from 7 to 10, changed the screenshotQuality cvar from 3 (the default) to 10 (max) and retook the screenshots (which are already live in the post). Other settings were already on max, with the exception of Ray Traced Shadows which is disabled.

Top images are the original ones, and bottom images are the new ones. As you can see, in-game settings related to quality don't seem to affect the rendering of the text. At least not on my screen resolution.

Set screenshot format to tga, that disables compression altogether.

/console screenshotFormat tga

Even with quality 10, jpg algorithm will introduce artifacts.

[Unholyground]

Glad i am not the only one not noticing any difference here? I think i need glasses lol

It's pretty easy to notice, I need glasses and I can even tell which one's better. It could just be because I built websites for 12 years and now I do game design and can tell when something is off.

[Goldpaw]

In regards to the font readability with Slug.

What those saying it's not crisp or no worthwhile improvement might not be thinking of, is that these fonts are in motion. Currently in-game, when names far away are moving, they can be hard to read, it looks like they are seen through mosaic or something. With slug it appears much clearer and cleaner to our eyes when it's in motion.

This really is a feature that is best demonstrated with videos, or proferably by seeing it in-game oneself. A screenshot comparison does not do it justice.

[MrFawlty]

It's wild to me people can't see the difference on the texts.

Same as when people can't notice the difference between 30 or 60fps.
Quite interesting how we perceive things differently.
Would love to be able to see the world through someone elses eyes.

Perhaps we should get some fanboy specs. Do Blizzard still supply them with collecter editions?

[cigawoot]

"Purchasing the Premium Pass unlocks all Premium Tiers, which feature seasonally themed Cosmetics and Premium Currency."

Okay I'm out.

You are aware that "Premium Currency" is just what's used to buy other cosmetics?

Basically the paid battle bass will award you premium currency so you can buy cosmetics with said currency, giving you some flexibility in what cosmetics you get. This isn't Diablo Immortal lmao

[Struggle]

This isn't all that reasonable an argument.

$60 gets you exactly what it does in a standard singleplayer video game and has since the introduction of Xbox360 and PS3: The game with its various storylines and content and all the regular items and cosmetics of an ARPG looter. Season pass content is the modern version of DLC. Additional post-release content added to the base game that was paid for, only unlike the original DLC iterations, season pass content typically involves new free stuff for people who aren't interested in paying for more, but extra cosmetic stuff for people who are.

It's like people have forgotten that 20 years ago you'd go to your local game-selling store pay the sticker price for a new game, and get that new game, and that was that. You play the ~15 hours of content and then the game was over and you wait for maybe an entirely separate sequel at the exact same price to release. Imagine walking up to someone from 2005 and going "Hey, bud. I know you just paid for that game and beat it, but actually the developer is going to patch in new areas and bosses and side story stuff every few months for the next several years that you don't have to pay anything for." Do you think they wouldn't consider that wildly generous?

People have become so jaded that they view devs as stingy if their additional free content for the game they flat bought also has entirely optional even more content that can be purchased.

20 years ago games included far more than 15 hours of content via free content patches, reasonably-priced expansions, etc.

This post is extremely silly.

[JMENGELE]

20 years ago games included far more than 15 hours of content via free content patches, reasonably-priced expansions, etc.

This post is extremely silly.

I agree. We're no longer in the Golden age of gaming. The meta now consists of replicating the monetization system in mobile games on a PC platform. Those of who haven't lived/played entirely through the early PC games cycle of the 2000-16 are heavily conditioned to accept copious amounts of monetization. The industrial simps, metaphorically subscribing to onlyfans just to subscribe again to get that premium snap. Through hive acceptance of multilevel paid systems, this is what the future holds for gaming. They'll *Gawk Gawk* the PC industry's giants into a gotcha system that preys on weak minds for pseudo gambling.