RFS: 0ad

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 11:33 PM, Philip Taylor <excors at gmail.com> wrote:

> My main concern is that that wouldn't provide sufficient consistency -
> different versions of Freetype, or the same version with different
> configuration (bytecode interpreter, autohinter, etc), might render
> the same font quite differently and break the look of the game.
> (Getting a font that renders nicely with recolouring and textured
> backgrounds and non-native monitor resolutions and with an
> outline-stroked variant etc seems tricky - they often look fine in a
> desktop application but not in the game). That problem applies equally
> to run-time and build-time. Distributing pre-built bitmaps seems to me
> the only way to be able to verify and guarantee the rendering quality
> across all environments.
>
> I think i18n for languages with small alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic, etc)
> is easily handled by sticking more glyphs in the bitmap. I expect
> large sets of glyphs (presumably CJK) or complex shaping (presumably
> Arabic etc) will need a different implementation, but I'd prefer to
> have the game support two text rendering modes simultaneously rather
> than compromising the quality of the primary languages, if there isn't
> a solution that works equally well for all.

My experience with warzone2100 and chromium-bsu is that runtime text
rendering works just fine. Only thing you have to watch is the
temptation to add bitmaps, parts of warzone2100 are untranslatable due
to that.

> Thanks, I'd forgotten about that. I'm currently on Gentoo so the
> package requires a cross-compiler environment, which seems less
> trivial to set up than using Wine, but it's probably a better

There is an nsis ebuild in Gentoo, looks like it has good instructions
on how to install the mingw stuff.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise