This is the mail archive of the xconq7@sources.redhat.com mailing list for the Xconq project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online


Jim Kingdon wrote:
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.

I was aware of Pango, due to the fact that I have read GTK+ documentation before, and that Pango is fairly heavily required package when one installs a Redhat distro (attempting to do without it breaks a fair number of deps).


I just sat down and looked at the Pango docs. It would appear that Pango can pretty much handle everything up to the point of rendering to the output device. I saw a note that it actually does have a function, which is not considered part of Pango proper, that handles rendering to an X11 display. However, this leaves the question of the Mac and Win32 platforms. Unless there is multi-platform, lightweight rendering API that can take a list of Pango glyphs (which I am led to believe is what comes out of the far end of the Pango pipeline) and actually draw them on the display, I am not sure how much use it would be to us. (I don't particularly consider GTK+ to be a lightweight rendering API, and there would be the question of how to get it to render in an SDL window, anyway.)

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.

Possibly. But, I have previously mentioned the possibility of writing labels in runic alphabets (both historical and fictitious):
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/xconq7/2004/msg01213.html


Of course, in that message, I was assuming that a select set of glyphs would be mapping to US-ASCII (as is currently done with 'font.bmp'). If they are Feanorean runes mapping to a character set representing the lexical tokens of the Quenya language, for example, then the task would be somewhat more complicated, I think (draw_string_quenya ?). And I doubt Pango is up to the task....

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".

Yeah, it's a thought, but not only does it have the shortcomings you mention, but it would likely lead to an explosion of new bitmaps. I personally would shy away from this solution.


Eric


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]