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Main » Suggestion Box » Custom glyphs
Poll
Well?
Keep them as letters and such
 1
Draw them with Private Use characters
 3
Do both with a user switch
 2
6 users have voted so far
Pages: 1
Posted on 04-14-13, 07:51 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

Posts: 229/344
Since: 06-08-12

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Noxico started out as a 16-color 256-character game with smiley faces for characters, like in Megazeux or ZZT. The font was a PNG file.

Then I added another page of 256 characters and a bit for entities and tiles to access it.

Then I did the smart thing and switched to Unicode, and also truecolor. I'm not sure which came first, but I think it was truecolor support.

Recently I reimplemented PNG font support with the fastest non-accellerated rendering method available to me. There are up to 256 separate font PNG files, each with 256 glyphs in. Not all of them actually exist, mostly because a large chunk of it spans the Private Use characters. 6400 characters to be exact. That's twenty-five pages/files that could be put to good use.

And since PNG fonts mean I'm not bound to someone else's fonts...



Please note: the third option, "do both with a switch" requires I store both the regular and fancy codepoint for each entity (and maybe tile) in the game among other things, whereas the second is merely a matter of changing some values in the XML data and calling it a day. Old saves would show a snake as 'ยง' and switch to the custom glyph when a brand new snake is instantiated.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 04-15-13, 08:41 pm

 

Posts: 2/2
Since: 02-10-13

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I'm tempted to say support both options, even though it's easier said than done.

The glyphs would make it easier for some people (like me) to identify characters, but on the other hand, they're too small to be easily identifiable unless zoomed in imo.
Posted on 04-15-13, 09:01 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Since: 06-08-12

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Here's something I came up with for a first go. In order, this encodes the head (regular, animal ears, horns), wings (none or small, large), and body (biped, snake, taur, quad, slime).

The silly thing is, the way these are ordered, I can dynamically assign these without changing the data and make the switch option easier to implement:
1) A slime would have 'J' as its representation, set in the bodyplan, as usual.
2) AdjustView reads the slime's token tree to set the on-screen representation to match. It takes the glyph from the <tt>ascii</tt> token, and the color from <tt>skin</tt> (or hair if slime)
3) If custom glyphs are enabled (and if there's an 0xE0 page for it to use), and no <tt>ascii/custom</tt> token exists, AdjustView can instead determine the closest representation from a few other tokens concerning legs, head, and wings.
4) If the character's token tree does include an <tt>ascii/custom</tt> token, that can be used without further issue. This'd allow the snake to use the one in the picture, without having the requisite body tokens.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 04-19-13, 05:29 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Since: 06-08-12

Last post: 1670 days
Last view: 1210 days
On second thought, custom glyphs make it difficult to tell who's the NPC. Right now, it's the player-exclusive @, but custom glyphs would introduce an inconsistency that, when fixed, brings a gameplay problem.

I don't just program Noxico...
Pages: 1
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