PHL Fonts

[edepot]

I started tinkering with fonts again after a long hiatus. I tried to name the new font technology appropriately but couldn't find one that was not taken. I wanted to use Visual Fonts, or Virtual Fonts, or Easy Fonts, or Dynamic Fonts, but no go. So I decided to go with simple initials: PHL Fonts (not DHL, the shipping company).

PHL Fonts is a font technology that lets you use WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) technology to create fonts, RIGHT in the bitmap or image file. In other words, all the information on the font (width, height, size, etc) is in the font image file. This works for proportional and fixed-width fonts. Most font technology available today uses an XML, binary, or text file that may use tags and the like to describe the font. Like: Height: 12, Spacing: 2, etc. Most simple games use a fixed bitmap and separate code that describes where the font information is located, and what is the height, spacing, etc. For PHL Fonts, these info are IN THE BITMAP GRAPHICS FILE along with the font itself. In other words, by looking at the graphical image of the font, you know the width, height, name, size, etc of the font. This way, you need not put font information separately from the bitmap graphical image of the font itself. Now, if you have a new font that is big, or small, fixed width or proportional, you just make your font, RIGHT inside the paint program.

A working implementation is inside AgenaWorld 1.8, which I will release after I am finished with the better physics implementation for the gravity.

PHL Fonts solves the problem with proportional fonts that I encountered in AgenaWorld 1.6. I needed to recode the program each time I changed the font size, or proportional, or fixed width. I solved this by having all the info VISUALLY inside the font bitmap image file itself. And it is all "visual" (What you see is what you get), right down to the font width, height, etc. It even accept alpha values so the fonts look nice and not jaggy. And you can do all of the font creation and defining right in the graphic file visually using a graphics paint program. No need for semantic text parsers to parse tags that define special properties in the font.

And for protection, I hereby copyright PHL Fonts, the name, technique for implementation, and display, and the description on how it works. If you want to use it, just ask for permission (http://www.edepot.com/feedback.html ).

[edepot]

Finally released Agenaworld 1.8 at http://www.edepot.com/game.html for download.

This is a small release to demonstrate the new fonts, text parser (the stargates are loaded from a file now), and a new gravity system which makes the ships run smoother. Note that the big fonts (stretched fonts) are not implemented yet, so only fonts that are 1:1 ratio to the font image file are able to be shown. You can control two ships at the same time in this release (shooting and thrusting), which may evolve into a different type of control system of multiple ships in the future.