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Fonts

Crimsonland ships two bitmap fonts:

  • Small font (smallFnt.dat + smallWhite.png): variable-width, 16x16 atlas, used by grim_draw_text_small. [static]
  • Grim2D mono font (resource id 0x6f): fixed 16px grid, used by grim_draw_text_mono. [static]

Small font (smallFnt.dat)

Location

  • game_bins/crimsonland/1.9.93-gog/crimson.paq: load\smallFnt.dat, load\smallWhite.tga
  • Extracted to artifacts/assets/crimson/load/smallFnt.dat and artifacts/assets/crimson/load/smallWhite.png

Layout

u8 widths[256]

widths[i] is the glyph advance in pixels for glyph index i (0-255). The renderer uses the same value to size the UV width.

Atlas + UVs

The extracted smallWhite.png (from smallWhite.tga) is 256x256 RGBA. The renderer treats it as a 16x16 grid, so each glyph cell is 16x16. UV origins are:

u0 = (idx % 16) / 16
v0 = (idx / 16) / 16
u1 = u0 + widths[idx] / 256
v1 = v0 + 1/16

The original Direct3D8 renderer applies a small bias of 1/512 to the U/V values to reduce bleeding. The Raylib/OpenGL port intentionally omits that inset because it visibly crops the small-font glyphs on this backend.

Identification (font source)

The small font glyphs match Pixel Arial 11. The closest match we found is PIXEARG_.TTF (often distributed as "Pixel Arial 11"). Reference: https://www.dafont.com/pixel-arial-11.font

Rendering hooks (grim.dll)

  • grim_init_system (FUN_10005eb0) loads load\smallFnt.dat and copies 0x100 bytes into grim_font2_glyph_widths.
  • grim_measure_text_width (vtable offset 0x14c) sums widths and returns the widest line.
  • grim_draw_text_small (vtable offset 0x144) binds GRIM_Font2 and emits quads using the UV math above.
  • grim_font2_char_map is initialized as an identity lookup table, so glyph index equals the byte value. [static]

Grim2D mono font (grim_draw_text_mono)

Source

  • grim_draw_text_mono binds grim_font_texture, which is loaded from Grim2D resources (resource id 0x6f). [static]

  • This is not yet confirmed to match default_font_courier.tga from crimson.paq. [static]

Behavior

  • Advance: 16 * scale (fixed). [static]
  • Cursor origin: x is treated as a cursor origin; the renderer advances X before drawing each glyph by 16 * scale (except when the 0xA7 control code marks the next glyph as “no pre-advance”). [static]
  • Line height: 28 * scale (newline step). [static]
  • Draw size: 32 * scale width x 32 * scale height. [static]
  • Baseline quirk: Most glyph quads are drawn at y + 1.0 (literal +1px, not scaled). [static]
  • Visual effect: Characters are drawn at 2x the size of their horizontal spacing, creating a dense, tall appearance (effective 1:2 aspect ratio relative to the grid). [static]
  • UVs: 16x16 table (grim_font2_uv_u/v), indexed directly by byte value (grim_font2_char_map is identity). [static]
  • Special codes: 0xA7 (skip pre-advance for next glyph), plus 0xE4/0xE5/0xF6 and \n. [static]

Quest title overlay (runtime evidence)

The quest HUD renders the level number and title with separate mono draws:

  • Title ("Land Hostile") uses the base scale (0.75 at 640px width, 0.8 at larger widths). [static+runtime]
  • Number ("1.1") uses base_scale - 0.2 (observed 0.55 when base is 0.75). [runtime]
  • Opacity: number alpha is 50% of title alpha (ratio 0.5 across captures). [runtime]

  • Position X: computed dynamically based on string length: [static] 

    number_x = title_x - (strlen(number) * number_scale * 8.0) - (number_scale * 32.0) - 4.0
    where 8.0 is half the font advance (16/2), 32.0 is the base gap, and 4.0 is a fixed offset. For "1.1" (3 chars) at scale 0.55: 3 * 0.55 * 8 + 0.55 * 32 + 4 = 34.8 px. For "1.10" (4 chars) at scale 0.55: 4 * 0.55 * 8 + 0.55 * 32 + 4 = 39.2 px. [static]

  • Position Y: computed from number_scale: [static] 

    number_y = title_y + (number_scale * 7.36)
    where 7.36 = 23.36 - 16.0 (constants at 0x46f5a0 and 0x46f230). At number_scale 0.55: 0.55 * 7.36 = 4.048 px lower than title. At number_scale 0.60: 0.60 * 7.36 = 4.416 px lower than title. [static]

Evidence: artifacts/frida/share/quest_title_colors.jsonl (quest HUD capture on 2026-01-20). Runtime logs show paired draw_text_mono calls for the title and number with the scale/alpha ratios above. Static analysis of ui_render_hud at 0x41bf94-0x41c01c confirms the dynamic x-position formula using strlen.

Sample render (interactive)

uv run crimson view fonts