Hmm...some experimenting of mine has produced some pretty interesting (and slightly annoying) results with my venture into using bitmap fonts.
I tried making my own simple, alphabet-only font, and then I saved it as a .PNG. My goal was to see if if I could paste the images of the letters without having to define a color as transparent, but it didn't work. I tried the following...
load image "font.png",1
for t=32 to 90
get image t,x,y,x+32,y+32,1
inc x,32
if x = 320
x = 0
inc y,32
endif
next t
...but that didn't work; there was simply a line of black boxes pasted on the screen. Then, I tried loading the .png as a bitmap even though I was pretty sure that command could only be used with .bmps. I found out I was wrong!
But still, it gave me the same, black-box result. So I went back into gimp, loaded the font, created a new, 0,0,255 (blue) layer, saved the font out, and tried the following...
set image colorkey 0,0,255
load bitmap "font.png",1
for t=32 to 90
get image t,x,y,x+32,y+32,1
inc x,32
if x = 320
x = 0
inc y,32
endif
next t
delete bitmap 1
...and wah-lah! My font appeared as I wanted it to! However, there are some artifacts in the characters and it's driving me a little bonkers. I don't know what's causing them; the compression settings in GIMP are normal and aren't causing strangely off-color pixels, even when I scale the image, so I'm lost. Is it the way I'm loading the image? It did the same thing with true .bmp files though, so I don't think that's it. Attached is my font image and here's the code...
Rem Project: bitmapfont
Rem Created: Monday, April 25, 2011
Rem ***** Main Source File *****
` Load font
set image colorkey 0,0,255
load bitmap "font1.png",1
` Get images
for t=32 to 90
get image t,x,y,x+32,y+32
inc x,32
if x=320
x=0
inc y,32
endif
next t
delete bitmap 1
backdrop on
color backdrop rgb(0,28,155)
sync on
sync rate 60
while escapekey()=0
writetext(0,1,"TESTING")
writetext(0,34,"WHY THE ARTIFACTS")
sync
endwhile
` Write the text using the bitmap font
function WriteText(x,y,Tex$)
` Go though each character in Tex$
for t=1 to len(Tex$)
` Get the ascii number of the current character
a=asc(mid$(Tex$,t))
` Paste the image of the current character
paste image a,x,y,1
` Increase x so it doesn't overwrite the last character
inc x,32
next t
endfunction
Yes, 99% of that is Grog's code. I haven't gotten around to making my own yet.
So, what's going on? How do I eliminate the artifacts? Any advice is appreciated, and thanks for the help so far guys!
[Attached Image] 
...Oh, and this thread is super off-topic now, so to go back to its original roots, could someone please point me in the direction for making my own installers? I'm still very interested in that procedure.
