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angstsmurf / spatterlight

Updated fork of Spatterlight
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Outstanding update! What do you think about supporting shaders? #6

Open agustincordes opened 4 years ago

agustincordes commented 4 years ago

What a coincidence, I just updated my local copy of Spatterlight and caught the cutting-edge version 😄

Absolutely loving the themes, this was a fantastic idea. What do you think about supporting CRT-like shaders? Openemulator is doing it on macOS with impressive results: https://github.com/openemulator/openemulator

A theme mimicking the Apple II look and feel to play Infocom games would be fantastic. This app (unfortunately abandoned) had some amazing vintage themes too: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cathode/id499233976?mt=12

angstsmurf commented 4 years ago

Thanks for you kind words!

I'd love to have something like that, but I have a hunch that it would be much easier to implement CRT shaders on an interpreter like Gargoyle, which does its own text rendering using OpenGL.

One of the defining features of Spatterlight is that it uses the macOS text system as much as possible, which gives it lots of functionality for free, such as full VoiceOver support for visually impaired players, but doesn't offer a lot of control over the final look. Which is why it currently doesn't even use the proper square cursor in the retro themes.

I haven't really looked into this though, so I may be wrong.

agustincordes commented 4 years ago

I understand. By all means, the tight integration with macOS is a terrific feature in Spatterlight and the reason why I use it. Perhaps this could be done with the theming system itself using a special font. Maybe some FX provided by macOS itself, such as text glow. The screen curvature could be tricker, though.