[chief1983]

I couldn't care less about retail data.

KK, I've never personally had any static with you, but this is the attitude that causes friction between the SCP and WCS.  The one rule the entire SCP agrees upon is compatibility with the retail FS2 data, as this is the FS2 Open Source engine after all.  Any deviation from this would have to be considered a fork, and as such unsupported by this community, no matter how awesome it might be.  Believe me, I'd love to make changes for FotG that would help us out immensely but unless we take measures to assure non-breakage of FS2 data, we can't afford it.  That's not to say things like data conversion will always be out of the question, but we always need to be able to maintain the retail experience as closely as possible.  This attitude is probably why your patches are often rejected on the first, second or more attempts.

[KeldorKatarn]

I couldn't care less about retail data.

KK, I've never personally had any static with you, but this is the attitude that causes friction between the SCP and WCS.  The one rule the entire SCP agrees upon is compatibility with the retail FS2 data, as this is the FS2 Open Source engine after all.  Any deviation from this would have to be considered a fork, and as such unsupported by this community, no matter how awesome it might be.  Believe me, I'd love to make changes for FotG that would help us out immensely but unless we take measures to assure non-breakage of FS2 data, we can't afford it.  That's not to say things like data conversion will always be out of the question, but we always need to be able to maintain the retail experience as closely as possible.  This attitude is probably why your patches are often rejected on the first, second or more attempts.

But not that someone would be developing for FS2_Open without the means to verify that their changes won't break with retail data, or that you would have such little knowledge about said data...

I'm not developing for FS_Open and I never was. I'm tryin to get a tool working. What the fact that I don't have FS2 installed has to do with this is really beyond me.
So do me a favor. Get out of this thread if you have nothing to add to it. In other forums one would call this trolling.

First of all: I'm not talking to you. Second of all. this is about the font tool, not about retail behavior of the engine or design philosophy. I was trying to get this one tool to work, so get OFF MY BACK. I've had it with this attitude here.
Saga has been on a fork for 3 weeks already so don#t worry. We won't bother your nice little engine anymore. Now leave me alone.

[Goober5000]

I'm not developing for FS_Open and I never was. I'm tryin to get a tool working. What the fact that I don't have FS2 installed has to do with this is really beyond me.

Simply the fact that fonttool was explicitly designed to work with retail FS2, and has barely been touched since then.  If you want to reproduce an experiment, it's a good idea to reproduce the original conditions.

So do me a favor. Get out of this thread if you have nothing to add to it. In other forums one would call this trolling.

First of all: I'm not talking to you. Second of all. this is about the font tool, not about retail behavior of the engine or design philosophy. I was trying to get this one tool to work, so get OFF MY BACK. I've had it with this attitude here.

Keldor, this behavior is inexcusable.  Chief1983 is a moderator and a senior member of the SCP.  He is trying to provide advice and tech support.  And he explicitly prefaced his post with words to the effect of "I mean no disrespect, but you should consider such and such."  To react in such a way to his polite and helpful post is rude, arrogant, and offensive.  You are the troll here.  And if you continue to engage in trolling, you will be banned.  Consider this an official warning.

Saga has been on a fork for 3 weeks already so don#t worry. We won't bother your nice little engine anymore. Now leave me alone.

You should consider that non-SCP builds of FSO are not supported by HLP, and will not receive either technical or troubleshooting support.  Be careful what you wish for.

[chief1983]

I'm not developing for FS_Open and I never was. I'm tryin to get a tool working. What the fact that I don't have FS2 installed has to do with this is really beyond me.
So do me a favor. Get out of this thread if you have nothing to add to it. In other forums one would call this trolling.

First of all: I'm not talking to you. Second of all. this is about the font tool, not about retail behavior of the engine or design philosophy. I was trying to get this one tool to work, so get OFF MY BACK. I've had it with this attitude here.
Saga has been on a fork for 3 weeks already so don#t worry. We won't bother your nice little engine anymore. Now leave me alone.

Maybe not, but I'm talking to you.  I'm trying to step in before something escalates again as often does around here and defuse the likely inevitable attacks.  Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy though, maybe it's fate, I dunno but it seems incapable for you to deal with any member of this team (some more understandably than others).  I really wish you'd reconsider your tone towards me, but that's outside the scope of this thread.  I was aware of the fork already, so don't expect any shock and awe from me.  I hope that works out well for WCS.  I'll leave this thread be, if you'll let me.  Hopefully you can get your issues with the tool sorted out.

Goob, I don't think banning is necessary in this case if the thread just gets back on track.

[Goober5000]

It's not the thread that's the problem; Keldor has a history of this type of behavior.  He has claimed not to realize when things get heated, so I'm explicitly pointing it out for him.

It's also why I gave him a warning instead of a ban.  If things get back on track, then everything should be okay.

[karajorma]

Saga has been on a fork for 3 weeks already so don#t worry. We won't bother your nice little engine anymore. Now leave me alone.

Excellent. I'll remove the -wcs flag immediately!

* karajorma has wanted to do that for years!

Now I've just got to figure out how to get rid of the TBP one.

[Fury]

So I got ttf2pcx from http://www.allegro.cc/resource/Tools/Fonts/ttf2pcx. I then exported a font, any font and then tried to convert it to .vf in fonttool.exe. The tool however refuses to process the pcx file and complains "Box at 1,1 is less than one pixel wide".

In second page of this topic Talon 1024 had posted a pcx file which works fine. I noticed that the files ttf2pcx made and Talon's are clearly different.

I've attached the pcx file. How do I get this into .vf?

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Fury]

I really would appreciate if someone could instruct how to get fonts into a pcx file that fonttool.exe can convert. Please?

[ShadowGorrath]

There doesn't seem an easy way to do it besides inserting each and every character there by yourself. Then making sure it works: I had to use the first fonttool download in this thread for the conversion to work.

However, the results are unreadable. Anyone have any ideas how to make it more readable without changing the font? What are the requirements for the font PCX file anyway? Resolution, pallete, etc?

[Talon 1024]

Fonttool makes fonts in much the same way as Fonttool2.  Font characters are bordered with green squares, and fonttool cuts out the font characters from these green squares.  There are a few things to be aware of, though:

- All green squares must be the same height.  However, you can make them as wide or as narrow as you want.  All of the font characters do not have to be on the same row of green cells; you can break the rows of cells wherever you want, but these rows must have at least 1 pixel between the bottom of the first row and the top of the second row.
- The encoding used when creating these fonts is Windows-1252, but fonttool starts with character 32 and ends at character 252.  Therefore, the first cell contains character 32 (space), the second cell contains character 33(!), etc.
- The palette used is the same palette used for shield ANIs and HUD gauges in FS2; It's a special 15-color grayscale palette.  I have this palette in GIMP format here.  Just download it and copy it into your C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.gimp-2.6\palettes directory.

I used GIMP to create the custom fonts for Hostile Frontier.  I did it by adding batches of characters to the working image, and moving each character into position manually.  I used the pipe character (|) as a guide for maximum/minimum height for the characters, and I just used whatever horizontal spacing seemed reasonable for the characters (large fonts have 2 pixels after each character, small fonts have 1 pixel after each character.)

Anyone have any ideas how to make it more readable without changing the font? What are the requirements for the font PCX file anyway? Resolution, pallete, etc?

Try playing around with the size and hinting settings in GIMP.  At one point, I had to use the "force auto-hinting" option because one of the fonts that I was trying to convert was virtually unreadable without it.

The maximum font sheet size for an FS font is 256x256, and the font must use the same palette that is used for HUD and shield icon ANIs.

BTW, the VF files for the WCHF custom fonts are available in the WCHF effects pack.

[Backslash]

Good info, Talon 1024.  Very complete.

It is very hard to find a font for font01 that is readable at only 9 pixels high (and 15 colors grayscale).  font02 is 18 pixels so at least that's something, but the main font we want to change is font01 (hud, briefings, techroom etc).  Takes a LOT of manual editing, but usually ends up just a compromise on a pixel font that looks ok.  Readability trumps coolness for now...

Attached are the font01 and font02 grids in PCX format, and the specialized palette in PAL format in case you use something besides GIMP

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Goober5000]

Talon 1024, would you mind creating a FSWiki page with the information you just posted?

[The E]

Okay, here's a quick-and-dirty guide on how to manually import the output of ttf2pcx into fonttool.

First, create the pcx in ttf2pcx. This will produce output like this:


Open this in an image editor of choice (I use Paint.Net, and through the course of this post, will continue to refer to it. Gimp or Photoshop should work as well).

Here, use the "Magic Wand" tool in global mode to select the yellow and pink parts of the image. Delete them, so that you end up with the letters on a transparent background, like so:


Now, open one of the font templates talon posted here.
Clear out the letters there.
Note that the "special characters" starting after the ~ symbol should be kept.
Then copy the new letters over one by one. Once you're done, adjust the green grid to match the size of the letters better. Save the whole thing as pcx. If you are using paint.net, do not forget to mark the "Use original Palette" checkbox in the save dialogue.
Feed that to fonttool via commandline, and you should have your .vf font ready.

EDIT: Here's the font: http://blueplanet.fsmods.net/E/font01.vf

[chief1983]

That's awesome, but as that sounds all entirely programmatic, hopefully we can code up something a little simpler?

[BlackDove]

Man, I sure hope so too.

[sigtau]

Possibly a merging of ttf2pcx and fonttool?

[Swifty]

I'm currently looking into ways of just getting fonttool to be fed a TrueType file and programmatically spit out a VF file. TTF2PCX is a good place to start but it uses a Windows library to process the font. Using the open source GNU Freetype library is probably the way to go.

[Fury]

That'd be awesome.

[chief1983]

If there's a BSD licensed alternative to FreeType I'd look into that, who knows maybe we could just integrate it directly into FSO at some point.  But not if it's GPL'd code.

[The E]

There's Pango, which is LGPL...