Font

[jkhristian]

How simple is it to change the fonts in exult these days?
I was just think it would be nive to have a high resolution version of the current font. Optional of course. Just to make reading a little easier.

[drcode]

It's a bit of work, since each glyph is a bitmap. Also, I don't know if you can improve the resolution, unless you make the font bigger.

[Colourless]

It can be done, but whether it would be easy to do it with Exult is a different matter. Of course it would still require a 'bigger font'

In Pentagram when I wrote the renderer for it I added in specific support for allowing us to draw 'High Resoultion' shapes and bitmaps ontop of the upscaled game world. This allows us to render text using 'high resoultion' true type fonts instead of the tiny font the original game used.

In theory it would be possible to do the same with Exult, and I 'was' planning on changing the graphics engine of Exult to be more like Pentagrams, but I no longer have the time to spend on Exult and Pentagram that I once had. The biggest problem with Exult is the scaling engine was added in as a post procesessing after thought. The engine still thinks it's running at the lower resolution and makes many assumptions about that.

[drcode]

I should take a look at Pentagram's rendering. Does it prescale everything? I thought that we had to scale after rendering in order for the scaler algorithms to work correctly.

[Colourless]

In Pentagram we render everything using Gumps, even the game world. We have a special 'scaling gump' that applies a scaler to the rendered results of all it's child gumps. We can then render more gumps on top of that. Of course there is some trickery involved in order to get the draw order correct with text. For simplicities sake Pentagram also renders in 32/16bit all the time.

Only downside to it at the moment is the mouse cursor is always drawn unscaled, which will get fixed eventually.

[marzo]

In Pentagram we render everything using Gumps, even the game world. We have a special 'scaling gump' that applies a scaler to the rendered results of all it's child gumps. We can then render more gumps on top of that.

Putting it in more usual graphic editing lingo, you have multiple layers in the screen, some of which are lower-resolution but scaled up to match the higher resolution of the unscaled layers, which are rendered on top. Correct?

[Colourless]

Conceptually you could consider it to be layers, and in many ways pentagram treats it as layers too, but in practice we've not strictly implemented like that. Gumps in Pentagram are a fairly complete UI system and it's implemented as a tree. We just do one call to the DesktopGump to paint and it calls render for all it's children, that call render for all their children and so on. One of the children of the DesktopGump is a ScalerGump object. The ScalerGump does all the required Coord translation for input, traces, rendering, etc as well as setting up the low resolution buffer for it's children to render it and doing the actual up scaling.

There are 3 main layers:
DesktopGump
ScalerGump (which is the bottom most child of DesktopGump)
InverterGump (which is the bottom most child of ScalerGump)

The InverterGump is a special gump that does the annoying screen inversion that U8 did when you press the 'wrong' buttons in the catacombs, and obviously has no relevance to Exult.

[drcode]

That sounds really good. Maybe that's something we should consider for Exult. I really need to study Pentagram's code.