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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




Joined: 05 Apr 2003
Posts: 3240
Location: Matakana

PostPosted: Fri May 06, 2011 2:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow, it's neat to hear that people are (were) still using Neo's utilities. PalEdit was certainly very nice. But Neo himself has argued several times that sophisticated tools like that should not be built into Custom, because we could never do as good a job as a dedicated graphics editor, and we'd be spending a lot of time on something that's unneeded. I mostly agree with him.

On the other hand, ChgPal's functionality should be built into Custom, because it's OHR-specific.

DOSBox?
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bis_senchi




Joined: 08 Jun 2004
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Location: Reims, France

PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2012 6:23 am    Post subject: Suggestion... regarding fonts Reply with quote

Ok! I've already sent this suggestion to James by email quite a while ago now but I think it worths also putting it here.

As you may know I'm french and I'm a member of the community for sereval years. I'm studing translation and I'm already spoken occasionally about making games in foreign language.
As it is now, the OHR can support dialogues in all the european languages and almost all western language ( but for Russian and Greek but you may need to get rid of potions armors symbols and so on as they are around 32 letters sometimes)...
For French, it is very easy, you just need to add the font with the correct accents.

Anyway, things starts to became troublesome for eastern languages like Japonese and especially Chinese. This is due to the fact that they're using kanjis and not letters. Fortunatelly, there is little things left to do to make OHR game makers able to make their game in Chinese or Japonese!

Chinese people needs around 6000 kanjis (and Japanese around 2600) to express all their ideas. One kanji equals a font and take the same place as a letter. e.g : the kanji 駅 (which means train station) take the same amount of space as the letter c

Right now we have 13*16= 208 fonts
I've noticed that in Zenzenic (and surely also the previous version) of custom.exe you could access the font table pressing ctrl space when we're in the text menu.

That's exactly how Chinese and Japanese people are keying text when they use their computer.
For example they press "hi"(which means along things sun) and various kanji with this pronunciation appeared in a small windows. Then they select it!

So I thought : what about using a part of the memory to store several "font tables".
What I call a font table is what is inside a .ohf file. It contains 13*16 = 208 characters.

In the edit font menu, we would have the possibilty to add and delete font tables. Font table 0 would be undeletable and would also be the one we see with the English Alphabet when we lauch custom.

As I say, we need around 6000 fonts for Chinese people. That makes
6000/208= 28.8461...
So if you could get enough space to get 30 font tables, you would have enough space to enter all the kanji you need to make you game in Chinese or japonese. There could a limit of 30 font tables if you need to save spaces for other things.

In the edit text box menu, after press ctrl+ alt we would have the possibility to browse between font tables. For example, I write

¿Dondé está la estacíon? (which means where is the train station in Spanish). All the letters could come from font table
one and the other signs from í,é,¿,á from a second one.
And later, I could even switch in Japanese 駅はどこですか。

Chinese game maker would use 30 font tables and could make their
dialogue all in chinese without worrying about space or having
to get rid of the english capital letters to gain some space.
Swedish, spanish and german game makers would only use one or two font tables with plenty of roman letters with accents.

American and British game makers could use font tables to switch between font polices. Font tables could be used to store a,b,c,d,e,f in Arial, Times New Roman etc...

The crtl alt function (with the browsing font table ability) would also be added when you "edit menu " so that menu items such as "status", "equip" and "quit" when they're translated can be keyed in by the game maker using another font table then the one we have by default .

So? What do you think about this? What about making a request to get this bitset?
Thanks for reading this long post and have a nice day!
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Last edited by bis_senchi on Sun Feb 12, 2012 8:13 pm; edited 1 time in total
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




Joined: 05 Apr 2003
Posts: 3240
Location: Matakana

PostPosted: Sun Feb 12, 2012 4:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You're probably not aware that about two weeks ago I did some work on this. Now you can type text using your operating system's keyboard layout and any input method editor (in theory: I have only tested dead keys and compose keys with European keyboard layouts, not an actual IME), and the input is restricted to Latin-1. I think that's better than using ctrl+space to enter characters. So typing "¿Dondé está la estacíon?" in the normal way now works, and typing "駅はどこですか。" should produce "????????"

There's a new default font which contains all the Latin-1 characters:



Of course any existing games would have replace or modify their existing font to take advantage of this.

In future I want to support more (unlimited) numbers of characters in each font, and also multiple fonts (eg. normal and italicised). For each font, you would be able to select variable-length ranges of unicode characters which you want to include in the font, plus ranges for non-unicode icons.

By the way, the individual icons are called "characters", not "fonts". A font is an entire collection of character images.

Quote:
The crtl alt function (with the browsing font table ability) would also be added when you "edit menu " so that menu items such as "status", "equip" and "quit" when they're translated can be keyed in by the game maker using another font table then the one we have by default .


What do you mean? You can already use ctrl+space everywhere in Custom.
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bis_senchi




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PostPosted: Sun Feb 12, 2012 8:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm glad to learn that there is a new basic font with many letters with accents.

My suggestion was the following
You said that when you keyed in 駅はどこですか, ???? were appearing. Is it because the font are not installed/ active on your computer?

As I said in my first post, Chinese needs 6000 characters and Japanese 2000. That's what I thought it would be great to be able to add fonts and beeing able to skip between them.

Japanese and Chinese people does not key in the same way we are precisely because of their characters.

They first key in the pronunciation of the work they want to key in. Eki for example and then several character which you pronunce eki appear on screen. According to its apparence, they find the characted which the good meaning and select the kanji they need (kanji 駅 means train station).

That's why I said it had been a very good idea to implement ctrl+ space
because it would became possible to search for a characters (just like we're doing for symbols)

The ctrl + space function must have been implemented everywhere in the wip recenlty because when I use my version of Zenzenic nothing happens.
(if I go on the edit menu and press ctrl+space I can't see fonts)

Anyway thanks for creating a ohf file plenty of letters with accents.
Do you think we'll be able to make dialogues in chinese and japanese someday with the Ohr?

Have a nice day!
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 12, 2012 10:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You didn't quite understand me.

You should already be able to type "駅はどこですか," into Game or Custom directly, using the normal IME (would you like to test it?). However, it will display as "????????", because those characters are missing from the font. I am going to allow more characters in the font so that it will totally work. However, there won't be any support for right-to-left, top-down, or complicated scripts like Arabic.
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bis_senchi




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PostPosted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 11:39 pm    Post subject: more than 6000 characters! That's impressive Reply with quote

The Mad Cacti wrote:

I am going to allow more characters in the font so that it will totally work.


That's precisely why I'm making this suggestion! You need to be able to
have around 6000 characters (on their kanji form) to be able to express your ideas in Chinese.
Are you sure you can make the font so much numerous?

Good luck trying Custom.exe!
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Bob the Hamster
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 7:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

In addition to needing more characters in a font, we will need to have support for bigger font characters (which I know is already partially possible) since there is no way most kanji can be expressed in 8x8 pixels.

I hope we can find some existing bitmap fonts under compatible licenses and just convert them into OHR format. I did a little searching today, but unfortunately bitmap fonts are a little tricky to find because truetype has dominated the font scene for so many years... I guess there is no reason that we can't convert truetype, except that it is more work, and will produce poorer results at the very small pixel sizes we need.
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bis_senchi




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PostPosted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 12:15 am    Post subject: another great idea Reply with quote

As kanji seems to be difficult to be put into 8*8 pixels my suggestion seems to be wrong!

What about using the methods for Hamster Master and by Fenir Lunaris when he was doing the credits for Finaly Fantasy H : that is to say use NPC
walkabout graphics to store kanjis...
We should be able to put them in text boxes which size is adapated thanks to the create rect command. No problem with reading direction: the load sprite function can make kanjis appear in the order we need we need from up to down or from left to write.

The main problem is the follwing? what can we do to make the player find easily the kanji he/she searching for. We definitely can't let the player searching for hours amoung thousands of hero walkabout graphics.
What about creating a bitset and copy and paste the code used for hero walkabout string boxing and characteristics? There could also be a form in which we key the pronunciation directly from our keyboard with the english alphabet?

Thanks for taking time to read advice and have a nice day!
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 21, 2012 1:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Our fonts in fact are 7x7, which is too small even for accented Latin characters.

Quote:
In addition to needing more characters in a font, we will need to have support for bigger font characters (which I know is already partially possible)


Of course, that's already done; just waiting on a new file format. Which I am thinking about doing before the next release.

Yes, I would like to be able to convert TTF fonts to bitmaps using FreeType (actually, FreeType supports tonnes of different font file formats). If I'll write such a utility, I might as well build it into Custom (though the dll, which is 450kB stripped, could be optional). I had a look at SDL_ttf's source, and found that it was amazingly complicated, 2000 lines. I guess I would fork SDL_ttf and make a few changes (especially to remove the dependency on SDL), since I hadn't found any better wrapper. Although probably I should just use FreeType directly (we won't have a use for the glyph caching that SDL_ttf does, and would like more information about each glyph, available glyphs).

Quote:
The main problem is the follwing? what can we do to make the player find easily the kanji he/she searching for.

That should already be solved, as I said: we support the OS's Input Method Editor. I don't have any installed on any of my machines to test it, though.
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