Just a question (about Exult and Pentagram)

[Andy]

I know that the sound systems have been somewhat merged between Exult, and Pentagram. I am curious about what plans there are in merging other aspects? Thanks.

[Colourless]

I was planning on semi porting Pentagrams graphics system over to Exult to clean things up however my time to spend on Exult and Pentagram now days is very limited so it hasn't been done.

[Andy]

Sounds like a neat venture. Hope you eventually get time to do it. What sort of improvements would there be?

I can relate to not having time. My project has suffered from that also. Some day, maybe we'll see a bunch of projects get done at once. I hope to see this, Exult 3D, and several others come to fruition. It's all great work (and a lot of it).

[WWWWolf]

Would the graphics system lifted from U8 include, at all, FreeType support?

The big, big, big complaint from most people over the whole of U7's existence: "Oo, this is a nice game, but that font is absolutely hideous." Readability of the in-game font is not a problem in U8, but it *is* a big flaw in U7 - I'd kill to see VeraSans in U7... =)

[486DX2/66 Dragon]

Personally, I love the U7 font.

Very atmospheric.

[SB-X]

I never had any problem reading the U7 text.

[Neutronium Dragon]

I really like U7's font too, and I never had a problem reading it, even back in the original.

I recall another dialogue issue coming up where it was mentioned that the lines of dialogue were essentially hard-formatted for the font and original screen size. If so, then a font change might not be quite so simple.

Neutronium Dragon

[drcode]

Never bothered me, either. With a bit of work, you can use EStudio to create new fonts for U7 from TrueType or Type1 font files.

[Wizardry Dragon]

It would score some modularity points to make it support fonts 'natively' without the extra step, though ^_~

~ Wizardry Dragon

[Watt]

The font support in Pentagram is definitely one of the cooler parts of the engine, but notice that it still tries to emulate the old fonts but make them actually readable.

IMO, this would be a good route for Exult to take as well... support TTF, but make it look very close to the original font (this would be especially useful in scaling it too

However, I'm pretty sure Colourless meant that the semi-port would be a mechanism for internally cleaing up some source without much in the way of making externally visable changes.

Just my 2 cents.

[Dangus]

Oh! You know what would be cool?! Use the Runic font as Ultima's main font That would really add to the atmosphere in my opinion. I remember back in the day I used to write whole documents in runic, just because I could.... haha

[Dominus]

the first thing I do on a new game is to enable a flag that gets rid of all the runic for me

[Wizardry Dragon]

Or at least add the Translate spell to Black Isle ^_~

~ Wizardry Dragon