Ghislain wrote:That would only give me 4*8 pixels to work with for each character.
This is the 4x8 pixel font I had designed myself and which I use with MINIPAINT, MG Browse, MG Text Edit, etc.:
It contains the complete 7-bit ASCII character set, and it has been tuned for a fairly good readability, especially on CRTs. OTOH, it's probably as generic as it could get: there are only so many variations possible on most of the glyphs, and any 'fancy' design would ultimately turn out as just being hideous. I fixed the capitals at 6 pixels and the lower case letters mostly at 4 pixels height *), save for those with ascenders and descenders - and in the latter case, a compromise for 'g', 'p', 'q' and 'y' was inevitable. Furthermore, I wanted to keep the letter "O" rounded, and as it was necessary to keep 0 and O clearly distinct, all numerals were derived from an assumed 7-segment-display. The digit "1" had to follow suit and so the letter "l" just sets itself apart from it by a different horizontal position within the 4x8 box.
I *chose* the encoding to be ASCII, not PETSCII, for mainly two reasons: the main body of text out there is encoded in ASCII, so there's no extra conversion step necessary (which would anyway be incomplete, as both encodings miss out glyphs from the other one), furthermore didn't see any sense to include the 'graphic' characters of PETSCII as the font lives in a bitmap anyway, i.e. I can draw any graphic decoration besides text that I want. The text rendering engine would allow for extra, user defined double-width glyphs though, positioned at the standard 8x8 character positions (<- that
might be important for your alignment, sex, etc. symbols).
However, given that RQ5 has already progressed that far, I wouldn't find it sensible to throw over one of the most fundamental design decisions that went into the game right from the beginning, the defined screen layout. Changing the display to use a 4x8 font would imply a costly redesign (and one doesn't replace the basement, when the house has already been erected, right?
)
But this font might come handy for anyone's next game or other production.
Greetings,
Michael
*) I've seen *a lot of* other attempts at 4x8 fonts which even don't get this simple thing right: when reading continuous text, the eye glides along the upper edge of the small letters, and if you make them an uneven height the reading flow is extremely disturbed!