From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21118 invoked by alias); 3 Oct 2004 15:59:37 -0000 Mailing-List: contact xconq7-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: xconq7-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 21091 invoked from network); 3 Oct 2004 15:59:36 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail1.panix.com) (166.84.1.72) by sourceware.org with SMTP; 3 Oct 2004 15:59:36 -0000 Received: from panix5.panix.com (panix5.panix.com [166.84.1.5]) by mail1.panix.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id CA74A48730; Sun, 3 Oct 2004 11:59:35 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from kingdon@localhost) by panix5.panix.com (8.11.6p2-a/8.8.8/PanixN1.1) id i93Fxag11465; Sun, 3 Oct 2004 11:59:36 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 03 Oct 2004 17:48:00 -0000 Message-Id: <200410031559.i93Fxag11465@panix5.panix.com> From: Jim Kingdon To: xconq7@sources.redhat.com In-reply-to: <415E0BED.6080105@phy.cmich.edu> (message from Eric McDonald on Fri, 01 Oct 2004 20:01:17 -0600) Subject: Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online References: <200410010555.i915tAn05390@panix5.panix.com> <415E0BED.6080105@phy.cmich.edu> X-SW-Source: 2004/txt/msg01328.txt.bz2 > I think that other font tables, similar to 'fonts.bmp' may need to be > used for other languages, and the 'draw_string' code will probably > have to be rewritten to dispatch to new functions such as > 'draw_string_en_US', 'draw_string_eo' :-), etc... as appropriate. Well, there is the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is to just pick up one of the existing rendering packages, such as pango ( http://www.pango.org/ ) and existing sets of fonts. Something along these lines is surely the way to go if we see it as a priority to support a wide variety of modern languages with minimal effort on the part of the game designer. The hard way is more custom, and has as a goal having more of a distinctive xconq look and/or a look specific to a particular xconq game. One possible solution which passes the buck to the game designer (or UI translator): rather than specify a unit name (or menu item) as text, specify it as a bitmap (in how many sizes? etc). This pushes all the rendering issues (bidirectional, combining glyphs in languages like thai, arabic, etc) to design-time than runtime. This doesn't help with cases in which humans enter text - the chat and "M" (message) features of a multiplayer game are what spring to mind. There's also "name a unit".