Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>]

> I think that other font tables, similar to 'fonts.bmp' may need to be
> used for other languages, and the 'draw_string' code will probably
> have to be rewritten to dispatch to new functions such as
> 'draw_string_en_US', 'draw_string_eo' :-), etc... as appropriate.

Well, there is the easy way and the hard way.  The easy way is to just
pick up one of the existing rendering packages, such as pango (
http://www.pango.org/ ) and existing sets of fonts.  Something along
these lines is surely the way to go if we see it as a priority to
support a wide variety of modern languages with minimal effort on the
part of the game designer.

The hard way is more custom, and has as a goal having more of a
distinctive xconq look and/or a look specific to a particular xconq
game.  One possible solution which passes the buck to the game
designer (or UI translator): rather than specify a unit name (or menu
item) as text, specify it as a bitmap (in how many sizes?  etc).  This
pushes all the rendering issues (bidirectional, combining glyphs in
languages like thai, arabic, etc) to design-time than runtime.  This
doesn't help with cases in which humans enter text - the chat and "M"
(message) features of a multiplayer game are what spring to mind.
There's also "name a unit".