Spring RTS Engine

Have a bit of "down" time during my evening shift and I can't really use it to play games so thought maybe I would do something wacky... the idea is that Dwarf Fortress now support True Type fonts... so I was thinking it would be awesome to port my favorite DF 16x16 font to a proper, vector based font...

what I'm trying to decide right now is which of the following looks better?
I'm personally parcial to the "VEX" one where each convex corner is converted to a curve but I figure this is going to be a lot of work, maybe I should ask around first.

one nice advantage to this project is that the final result will be a very usable console font for pretty much any ASCII based game or interface.

I cant really tell until I see a sentience written in it at a realistic font size.

I like the bottom one.

Personally the tile size I'm most comfortable playing with (due to limited screen space) is 16x16. At that scale there's no discernible difference between the images in your post. At 32x32 there's a tiny difference (I think I'd prefer the 2nd font), but the tiles are so large that it's difficult to see what's going on.

I'd go with the second one. You're really going to have to put together a few of the letters and create a dummy font to see how it looks at different resolutions, though.

While I am designing the images in SVG/Inkscape for later import to FontForge I quickly exported them at 6,12,16 and 24 "pixels square".. which should be very close to the equivalent "point size" when I make them into a font.
====================================================
Straight Pixels:









Rounded All Corners:









Rounded Convex Corners Only:









====================================================

Workflow for creating these SVGs means I can save after each version (I create the "straight pixels" then round the convex curves then round the concave curves), so I'll definitely make the first font (if I make any font at all)... still would like opinions.

I have finished making the SVGs for the "pixelated" standard characters (letters, numbers, key punctuation), but wonder if there is a list somewhere of all of the characters that could be used as text in DF.

I saw this list on the DF wiki, but notice that colon, asterisk and semi-colon are missing and am worried other characters might be aswell.

List of text characters

Changes to these may make text look strange or be difficult to understand, unless you are using the TrueType font feature.

* " ! ( ) _ + , - . 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 / [ ]
* A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
* a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
* 32 (Space);     [Bridge direction indicators]

Alphabets

Accented characters are used for names.

Dwarvish: ├¡├¿├«├»├®├│├║├╗├┤├Â├╣├▓├¬├¼├½├á├í├Ñ├ñ├óabcdefghiklmnorstuvz

Elvish: ├¡├¿├®├│├║├┐├╣├▓├¼├ºabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwyz

Human: ñáabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Goblin: ├╗├┤├Â├¬├½├ñ├Ñ├óabdeghklmnoprstuxz

next phase is to make the accented characters.

SinbadEV wrote:I have finished making the SVGs for the "pixelated" standard characters (letters, numbers, key punctuation), but wonder if there is a list somewhere of all of the characters that could be used as text in DF.

I saw this list on the DF wiki, but notice that colon, asterisk and semi-colon are missing and am worried other characters might be aswell.

List of text characters

Changes to these may make text look strange or be difficult to understand, unless you are using the TrueType font feature.

* " ! ( ) _ + , - . 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 / [ ]
* A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
* a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
* 32 (Space);     [Bridge direction indicators]

Alphabets

Accented characters are used for names.

Dwarvish: ├¡├¿├«├»├®├│├║├╗├┤├Â├╣├▓├¬├¼├½├á├í├Ñ├ñ├óabcdefghiklmnorstuvz

Elvish: ├¡├¿├®├│├║├┐├╣├▓├¼├ºabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwyz

Human: ñáabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Goblin: ├╗├┤├Â├¬├½├ñ├Ñ├óabdeghklmnoprstuxz

next phase is to make the accented characters.

I believe both colon and semi colon are used in game play though. They represent items IIRC

the great thing about the TTF font support (BTW it's a future version thing), is that this font will only be used for text, allowing the traditional "FONT Image" to be altered to ones hearts content. aka, with TTF fonts enabled you could change the "image" for 0 to look like a coffin and stuff like that without interfering with the way menu text looks.

so my goal is simply to port the necessary characters from my favorite pixel font to a TTF so the visual style isn't interrupted by a different style of character in the font then is used for the tiles/objects/creatures.

SinbadEV wrote:the great thing about the TTF font support (BTW it's a future version thing), is that this font will only be used for text, allowing the traditional "FONT Image" to be altered to ones hearts content. aka, with a TTF font you could change the "image" for 0 to look like a coffin and stuff like that without interfering with the way menu text looks.

What I'm saying, is I believe that at some point toady tried to avoid using the character in the menus because it was replaced in many of the texture packs. I can't recall seeing a semi colon or colon in any of the menus in the most recent versions of the game. But I'm not sure.

SwiftSpear wrote:

SinbadEV wrote:the great thing about the TTF font support (BTW it's a future version thing), is that this font will only be used for text, allowing the traditional "FONT Image" to be altered to ones hearts content. aka, with a TTF font you could change the "image" for 0 to look like a coffin and stuff like that without interfering with the way menu text looks.

What I'm saying, is I believe that at some point toady tried to avoid using the character in the menus because it was replaced in many of the texture packs. I can't recall seeing a semi colon or colon in any of the menus in the most recent versions of the game. But I'm not sure.

Ah, well, I'm planning on creating a "usable" font anyways so pretty much all English punctuation will be included.

I'm aware, I was just giving the reason for why it wasn't included in the wiki page. The Wiki would differentiate "gameplay" characters from "text" characters, as that is currently the way the game works, even though there is some overlap as you pointed out.

Well, this is the barf-build of the Pixelated version of the font... some of the glyphs were invalid and many characters are missing but the alphabet in upper and lower case seems fine.

as mentioned earlier and elsewhere I only have the level of free time to work on this project every second week so I'll probably clean it up for a "real" version sometime next week... then I'll consider building the "slightly rounded" version.