Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

Jim Kingdon wrote:
>>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.  

I was aware of Pango, due to the fact that I have read GTK+ 
documentation before, and that Pango is fairly heavily required package 
when one installs a Redhat distro (attempting to do without it breaks a 
fair number of deps).

I just sat down and looked at the Pango docs. It would appear that Pango 
can pretty much handle everything up to the point of rendering to the 
output device. I saw a note that it actually does have a function, which 
is not considered part of Pango proper, that handles rendering to an X11 
display. However, this leaves the question of the Mac and Win32 
platforms. Unless there is multi-platform, lightweight rendering API 
that can take a list of Pango glyphs (which I am led to believe is what 
comes out of the far end of the Pango pipeline) and actually draw them 
on the display, I am not sure how much use it would be to us. (I don't 
particularly consider GTK+ to be a lightweight rendering API, and there 
would be the question of how to get it to render in an SDL window, anyway.)

>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.

Possibly. But, I have previously mentioned the possibility of writing 
labels in runic alphabets (both historical and fictitious):
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/xconq7/2004/msg01213.html

Of course, in that message, I was assuming that a select set of glyphs 
would be mapping to US-ASCII (as is currently done with 'font.bmp'). If 
they are Feanorean runes mapping to a character set representing the 
lexical tokens of the Quenya language, for example, then the task would 
be somewhat more complicated, I think (draw_string_quenya ?). And I 
doubt Pango is up to the task....

> 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".

Yeah, it's a thought, but not only does it have the shortcomings you 
mention, but it would likely lead to an explosion of new bitmaps. I 
personally would shy away from this solution.

Eric