Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.angband (More info?)
Hi folks, I have three potential contributions to make to the
Angband community. I'm querrying for interest in each to see
how much I should sweat to finish them and send patches.
Before I get into them, I should note that my main thrust is
to improve the text-mode experience. I have been playing the *bands
for 8 years now and thoroughly enjoy the concept of screaming when
running into a 'D' at character level 20. I wish to preserve this
experience, but enhance it with a few choice utilities and features.
Angband Glyph Editor
-------------------
A GTK program that allows one to assign new character glyphs and
colors to items, monsters and terrain features with ease. There is
a screenshot available, which probably explains better:
http://img237.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img237&image=angedit5qd.png
It will be released probably GPL so others can tack on more features,
such as a color editor (I might do that, it's easy), and so on.
GTK2 w/ Pango
-------------
I've fixed the gtk2 support in ToME and will backport it to Angband
in time. GTK is the Gimp Tool Kit used in GNOME, which is available
for Linux, Mac, Windows, and a variety of other systems.
Unicode Support
---------------
I believe that the richer Angband variants, such as ToME, are hurt
by the limited character set. It's painful when we have to reuse
characters to represent different classes of objects, such as '^'
for traps and mountains. I intend to fix that problem by adding
support for unicode. That way, we can represent trees with the spade
or club symbols, walls with the drawing blocks, and, best of all,
uniques with accented versions of their representative characters.
What's cooler than runing into a unique orc with an umlaut? Running
into new monster types represented by greek letters! The task of
re-assigning character glyphs will be made painless with the Angband
Glyph Editor.
I need a little input on how to achieve unicode support. There are
two main problems. The first one is that we will need to create,
modify or recommend a _scalable_ font set to distribute with the
game that has enough of the symbols we need. (I wasn't too happy
with the various bitmap fonts available, they are more graphical
than text-mode, not to mention unscalable.)
I've noticed that most truetype fonts define the accented extended
latin up to 0xFF and most define a few greek symbols, some math
symbols, and a few miscellaneous symbols. It would be most convenient
to create our own, but then aesthetic differences will probably arise.
Still, I recommend a font similar to the freely-available Bitstream
Vera Sans Mono. It is the best one I found after all these years. What
it lacks is a good chunk of symbols. There are also icky licensing
issues.
The other problem relates to the use of char in Angband to represent
internal items. On some machines, like mine, char is unsigned. When
file.c parses a preference file, it assings the long value to a char,
which ends up padding the left bits with 1's. Hence, setting a
permanent wall to the block glyph (UTF 0x2588) results in a char value
of 0xFFFF2588 instead of 0x2588, which makes handling unicode in the
main-xxx.c files impossible. The simplest hack will be to alter file.c
and use our own version of strtol(). I don't know what the
consequences of this method are for other features, such as graphics,
so I need some advice.
I'll be glad to hear any feedback. This is not my real name or email,
but you can reach me at fando.magnet at gmail com. Or just post in
this thread.
Cheers,
Fando
Hi folks, I have three potential contributions to make to the
Angband community. I'm querrying for interest in each to see
how much I should sweat to finish them and send patches.
Before I get into them, I should note that my main thrust is
to improve the text-mode experience. I have been playing the *bands
for 8 years now and thoroughly enjoy the concept of screaming when
running into a 'D' at character level 20. I wish to preserve this
experience, but enhance it with a few choice utilities and features.
Angband Glyph Editor
-------------------
A GTK program that allows one to assign new character glyphs and
colors to items, monsters and terrain features with ease. There is
a screenshot available, which probably explains better:
http://img237.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img237&image=angedit5qd.png
It will be released probably GPL so others can tack on more features,
such as a color editor (I might do that, it's easy), and so on.
GTK2 w/ Pango
-------------
I've fixed the gtk2 support in ToME and will backport it to Angband
in time. GTK is the Gimp Tool Kit used in GNOME, which is available
for Linux, Mac, Windows, and a variety of other systems.
Unicode Support
---------------
I believe that the richer Angband variants, such as ToME, are hurt
by the limited character set. It's painful when we have to reuse
characters to represent different classes of objects, such as '^'
for traps and mountains. I intend to fix that problem by adding
support for unicode. That way, we can represent trees with the spade
or club symbols, walls with the drawing blocks, and, best of all,
uniques with accented versions of their representative characters.
What's cooler than runing into a unique orc with an umlaut? Running
into new monster types represented by greek letters! The task of
re-assigning character glyphs will be made painless with the Angband
Glyph Editor.
I need a little input on how to achieve unicode support. There are
two main problems. The first one is that we will need to create,
modify or recommend a _scalable_ font set to distribute with the
game that has enough of the symbols we need. (I wasn't too happy
with the various bitmap fonts available, they are more graphical
than text-mode, not to mention unscalable.)
I've noticed that most truetype fonts define the accented extended
latin up to 0xFF and most define a few greek symbols, some math
symbols, and a few miscellaneous symbols. It would be most convenient
to create our own, but then aesthetic differences will probably arise.
Still, I recommend a font similar to the freely-available Bitstream
Vera Sans Mono. It is the best one I found after all these years. What
it lacks is a good chunk of symbols. There are also icky licensing
issues.
The other problem relates to the use of char in Angband to represent
internal items. On some machines, like mine, char is unsigned. When
file.c parses a preference file, it assings the long value to a char,
which ends up padding the left bits with 1's. Hence, setting a
permanent wall to the block glyph (UTF 0x2588) results in a char value
of 0xFFFF2588 instead of 0x2588, which makes handling unicode in the
main-xxx.c files impossible. The simplest hack will be to alter file.c
and use our own version of strtol(). I don't know what the
consequences of this method are for other features, such as graphics,
so I need some advice.
I'll be glad to hear any feedback. This is not my real name or email,
but you can reach me at fando.magnet at gmail com. Or just post in
this thread.
Cheers,
Fando
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram