Oolite Bulletins

another_commander wrote:

We don't really need it at this point. It takes more work than it's worth to support it fully.

Sorry a_c, I didn't wanted to make the list even longer. It was only meant to be something to keep in mind (maybe after MNSR) :-)

Svengali, no problem at all. I like it that ideas are being thrown around. Some of them can be implemented immediately, others may take time, others remind us that something needs fixing and others have to be rejected for technical or gameplay reasons, but in general, ideas and suggestions is what keeps us going. Feel free to add to the list, it's just that some requested features will probably have to be considered for later.

Svengali wrote:

Cheater, dadabumm

I hear mild mocking tones in my direction. In my own defence I will state that the screen shot came from a commander that I created with a hacked wealth so that I could test out various game features and ships while I write the manual. In no way would I ever used such a hacked file in real-life. In aforementioned real-life old KZ9999 hasn't got 4K credits to his name after flying for a game year, although he does fly a nicely tricked out Wolf. Anyway, what better way to understand a game than trying to break it. It gives me clues on what advice Uncle Bob should be giving fresh new Jamerson's to survive their first few flights.

EDIT: Please not that the previous paragraph was said totally tongue in cheek.

Back to the font issue. Perhaps an alternative solution to the text overrun issue in the shipyard is to scale back the amount of optional extras that a ship comes fitted with. While it's understandable that there should be second hand ships with extras for sale, the pictured Merlin comes with 18 of them! I wouldn't complain if the ships on had a limited number of upgrades. It gives you motivation to earn while keeping the prices more reachable.

I've got a few ideas on how that could be handed in a realistic way but it's off thread. I'll, or someone else can, start a thread if there's interest.

Hehe, KZ9999. No need to explain it. Simply welcome here onbord.

KZ9999 wrote:

I hear mild mocking tones in my direction.

Mocking tones? In your direction? Never ever! Can these eyes lie to you?
BTW: I've already downloaded your manual - great job, Commander 'Rich' KZ9999 :-)

PS: I'm always cheating, maybe because I'm always testing...

Ok, last bugfixes for the tty font oxp:

It now displays the font properly in macs, it wasn't before(!)
I've squeezed the font, so now it's almost the same width than the original one, give or take. This way mission screens like Local Hero should still look ok!

I've added a few comments inside oolite-font.plist to help identify which kerning belongs to which letter.

If anyone else wants to play with the concept, please do! All this precision positioning takes a lot of time, and I'm not likely to play with another font in the near future!

The updated tty v0.5 is available from the same place as before: tty.oxp.

Cheers,

Kaks

The reason Oolite uses a pixmap for fonts is that it’s simple. Getting good results with “real” fonts across platforms is immensely complex, and last time I looked the available libraries were hard to build, hard to use and unmaintained.

Better control over text rendering is something that would be nice, and would be a logical part of a major overhaul of the UI system that I have mapped out in my head, but I’m not going to consider working on it or even describing the plan before the next release.

Test release 1.71 introduced a higher-resolution font as well as oolite-font.plist and more accurate leading. In support of this, I wrote an program to generate both the texture and the plist, which could be adapted for other fonts (for reference, the standard one is Linotype Helvetica Bold, apart from the Oolite-specific glyphs). However, it requires some hand-holding and only runs on Macs. If anyone is interested, it’s in the source tree (trunk/tools/fonttexgen/).

While on the general subject, I should point out that versions of the font for certain other character sets are also available.

tty.oxp

I was going through the OXP List and putting Y's into the working boxes of oxp's I have tested and saw that this was blank. Does it work with 1.76? If so I could Y the box?

Fatleaf wrote:

tty.oxp

I was going through the OXP List and putting Y's into the working boxes of oxp's I have tested and saw that this was blank. Does it work with 1.76? If so I could Y the box?

It should be compatible, just like the 'new font' that is also somewhere. The only problem that could arise is that the width of some characters might be different, resulting in different layout of missionscreens.
But if that would be important, that would be a bug in the oxp not being able to handle different font sizes.

e.g. Little Bear filled out all 40 bar titles in random hits with ***** to get the title centred. In the comment he wrote it was a lot of work to get it right, but worth the trouble. With a different font size, this whole layout is ruined But, in the current version of RH all those well designed strings are deleted and replaced with a function that calculates string size and fills it out based on the currently used font. That now works for any font, including the tty font.

I was a bit curious, so I did a small test in the console without the tty font installed: And with the tty font It indeed uses a different character width so that some careful designed missionpages might wrap differently than planed.