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Hello World,

I don't think this is quite ready for a WIP thread yet, but I need some feed back from people. I have had very limited uptake of testers (Its a lot easier to try and get u'r average Joe to play a game you've written, than a small application aimed at the hobbyist games programmer, lol).

I'm a big fan of Scraggles bitmap fonts, and was in the middle of modifying one to make the Title for Zombies! when I thought "How cool would it be, To have a Utility which could not only created a 10 x 10 bitmap font grid (like Scraggle's) but also create a game title in the same font, just a larger size"; and so my bitmap font creator was born...

http://www.warriorsofthecucumber.com/bitmapfontcreator

Its a long way from finished, It doesn't actually create any graphical output yet. I'm more wondering how you find the interface to use, and the layout.

It does provide you with a Preview of what the font will look like tho.

I think its fairly straight forward to use, but if you have any problems then please let me know

Let me know what you think please.

not a bad start, Prof:

1) please sort the font names in the queue and perhaps omit duplicates(ie, @FontName = FontName. i don't know if there's a difference but they appear the same)

1b) i would appreciate a pull-down menu for fonts vs left/right arrows.... scratch that! just went back and found it was already in there (no documentaion yet...)

2) when opening an application that requires UAC confirmation on Vista(64), BFC crashes: "Runtime Error 502 - Image does not exist at line 1813."

3) i see you will be adding to the Shadow functionality. i would appreciate horizontal and vertical off-sets.

4) will you be adding multi-line support?

5) i'm assuming you know the controls can be pretty sluggish.

6) is the report you're generating being sent to you automatically?

@Virtual Nomad:

Firstly let me start by saying Thank you for testing it for me, and in answer to your questions...

1) I do want to alphabetise the list of fonts, altho this will probly wait until I have done the load/save requesters (They will prolly need alphabetising as well as sorting into dirs/files.

1b) Documentation will follow once more of the application is complete. I've already changed the layout of tab 2 & 3 once; wouldn't want to keep having to rewrite the docs.

2) I have win7 64 upstairs on my desktop, I'll try this; but it sounds to me the same kinda problem as u get when u change resolution and it flushes the gfx buffer. Not sure I can work round that. I'll have a look tho and try and duplicate the error.

3) Shadows will be rotatable in 45 degree increments, as well as a toplit (shadow all round) option

4) The editor will output the bitmap font tile set with the Fontset settings, then the captions, using the caption settings. (Font, fill etc stay same, but u can vary sizes between them).
The Captions tab will allow you to add things like a game title, game over and start game messages for example in a larger or smaller size. Altho I had only planned on these being a single line each, I see no reason why multiple lines would be an issue.

5) The controls were sluggish on my athlon 3000xp; but I thought it was better now? I'll have another think about it.

Which bits in particular was it most sluggish on? I know the font requester is well slow due to it using the native dbp font commands.

I do have cloggy's D3D plug in, and am considering changing this in the future.

6) Yes it is, altho if you run it from in the archive, it won't write the file and so can't send it. I think I've worked a way round this in the new version by writing it into a temp folder rather than the folder with the .exe in.

It still tries to copy it to the folder with the .exe in as well, so the user can read it.

Thanks again for taking the time to try my Bitmap font creator, and I'll add your name to the credits for being the first person to post here!

I must admit to being disappointed that so few people tried this, and only Virtual Nomad posted comments.

However, I'll get working on improving the sluggishness of the UI, I'll add either a quick how to guide or rough out the help pages, and i'll try and get it a little more complete before I post it here again.

If any one else has some suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

Slow time on the boards a lot of people on vacation, do not despair. And maybe it would get noticed more on the WIP?

I too use Scraggles and have code that already accepts them for my bitmap font module. I was getting ready for the pain of using Juicy Fonts and placing the fonts in their Scraggle-y order on a BMP, but if your program does something similar then that will save me a lot of time. So I'll be trying this out soonish.

Happy to see people are making good use of my fonts

I just tried your Bitmap Font Creator and I can see that it has a lot of potential. I have listed a few things below which I think would improve it a lot:

Font list - Needs sorting alphabetically, but that has already been mentioned.

Option to change the background colour - If you want a black outline or a black shadow, you can't see it on a black background. So the user should be able to choose a background colour or even an image file so they can see what the font would look like against a backdrop of their game.

Fill modes - When one is selected, have the other two greyed out.

Texture fill mode - Include the option to scale the texture.

Gradient fill mode - At the moment you just have a single vertical gradient using two colours. More gradient styles would be better.

Shadow - Use soft shadows at any angle. BLUR BITMAP would be an easy way to provide soft shadows.

Outer glow - You haven't provided an out glow option but it should be fairly easy to implement. Again, using the BLUR BITMAP command and then pasting the result behind your font (with no offset) would provide an outer glow. You would need an option to change the size of the glow. That could be done by utilising a function similar to your outline function to change the size of the font and then passing the new sized font to the outer glow routine.

There are many other effects that would be beneficial like: bevel/emboss, inner glow, inner shadow etc. but on the whole it looks pretty good.

One last thing: I would recommend having a 'save style' option that will save every current setting (except font name and size) so that any settings you are happy with could later be loaded again and applied to another font.

Happy coding

@Tiresius
I put this here as I didn't think it was quite ready for a WIP thread. Maybe when it's more complete.

@Scraggle:
Yes, I can already change the background colour from inside the code (I did it when I made the logo for the website); but as yet, I haven't decided where to put the bgCol requester button

I am thinking about using just one button, displaying the relevent mode image, instead of the 3 it has now.

Yes, I will include an option to turn texture scaling off.

More Gradient fills will be added, as well as a preset range of colours to the colour chooser (As suggested by Semi )

I will look into the blur bitmap command; and the glowing. I did have a glow feature planned, but haven't worked out how to make it work yet.

And thankyou for the bitmap Fonts