Love the new signs

Agreed. The signs add so much to the game. They are so much better than the signs made out of 1x1 letters. I just wish we could make them in the game as well, so I can decorate my bases with them.
 
We need a mod that lets us increase the pool of possible signs with our own folders of images

The community-made PoI packs are about to look a lot better too
 
ravenx99 said:
As many things as I love about this experimental, the new sign tech really elevates the game... just seeing it in places as simple as cafe menus adds some missing depth.
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It is really incredible how much something so simple can give the entire game a face lift. It honestly feels like an engine upgrade because everything has branding. Much more immersive. Downtowns finally have an identity.
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geengaween said:
We need a mod that lets us increase the pool of possible signs with our own folders of images

The community-made PoI packs are about to look a lot better too
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The Urban Decay mod has quite a few signs in it, and graffiti, not sure how they did that.
 
Riamus said:
They are just art assets that were created and added to custom blocks. Not difficult to do if you know how to make art assets for Unity (I don't).
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That's the thing, they're just art assets, but they apparently aren't textures, which TFP was doing signs as before. I'm wondering if they learned some new trick from the new owners.
 
ravenx99 said:
That's the thing, they're just art assets, but they apparently aren't textures, which TFP was doing signs as before. I'm wondering if they learned some new trick from the new owners.
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Riamus was responding to warmer's comment on the Urban Decay mod, which does use art assets (disclaimer: I assume the mod uses art assets).

The new sign tech uses "shaders", which have been around for several decades. It's a neat trick. In very general terms (because I am by no means an expert on how shaders work), the sign tech is working with shape primitives in a way that stores things like vertex coordinates and color information rather than saving every individual pixel. For instance, say you wanted a sign that was just a purple square. The shader only needs to store the relative positions of the four corners of the square and the square's color.

What is neat about this trick is that not only does that mean each sign takes up much less disk space, but graphics cards support shaders natively. The game need only share that simple, smaller data with the graphics card and the card will render it. Meaning less graphics memory is used in displaying the sign.
 
I kind of figured new signage would help the game's look a lot. If you dig in my old posts years back, I was asking for a set of letters in 1-2 new fonts or for making the letters changeable into different fonts via radial menu.

But what we got blew any request of mine out the window, it's fantastic, and it's amazing what you can do with it. They took one of the biggest negative visual outliers and made it into a positive one, which just brings the whole game up.

I just wish we could open the packed-up signs to learn a few of the tricks they used for certain signs. Or do packing of our own so we can use more than 10 layers as they absolutely have with certain vanilla POI signs (there's at least 3-4 layers of noise/wear alone on many of them!). Still, you can get a lot done with what they gave us.
 
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