try higher-resolution font

[increpare]

The legibility of the current one is so awful.

[rmmh]

8x8, NES style?

[sfiera]

Any design constraints? Square? Monospace?

A brief look at the code suggests that a rectangular font wouldn't require much extra code. Rectangular is probably more readable than square, and 5-by-5 squares could stay central to the design (with the addition of ascenders and descenders).

[increpare]

I don't know. This bug is me griping about a problem. But in some ways, it's okay if it's terrible - puzzlescript isn't really for text-based games and most games with lots of text ... I don't feel that changing the engine to cater to them is necessarily a good idea ...

So I don't know. If you want to have a play around for your own pleasure and see what you can do, great, but I don't know what I'll accept back into the main branch...

[sfiera]

Sure, I won't get my hopes up on anything being merged back.

For context, the Japanese message to the mailing list got me thinking about language support; the font is ASCII only now and I don't think we can fit ç or é in a 5x5 square, let alone あ. There's plenty of other stuff tied up in that issue but it starts here.

[increpare]

I'm not worrying about non-A-Z characters for messages. (I used up all my worries about that playing about with arabic support).

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 3:25 PM, Chris Pickel notifications@github.com wrote:

Sure, I won't get my hopes up on anything being merged back.

For context, the Japanese message to the mailing list got me thinking about language support; the font is ASCII only now and I don't think we can fit ç or é in a 5x5 square, let alone あ. There's plenty of other stuff tied up in that issue but it starts here.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/increpare/PuzzleScript/issues/199#issuecomment-68713824 .

[sfiera]

Title screen 1 2 3 Message 1 2 3

Three pictures each: current font (1), new lowercase letters (2), all new letters (3). I think (2) is a definite improvement, though (3) starts to feel a bit bland.

Rectangular sprites were almost supported already—it only took 14 lines of code to get the rest of the way. Code in sfiera/PuzzleScript:font.

[Draknek]

I would definitely be in favour of (3). Bland is a lot better than weird/hard to read.

FWIW, there's this font for pixel Japanese writing: http://akashicdesign.net/ja/88-zen/ though obviously with manually defined characters it's not actually practical to add as many characters as that.

[sfiera]

Bland is better than hard-to-read. I don't necessarily think it's better than weird! Weird fonts have character, and fitting capitals in 5x5 keeps the font in character for the engine. Do you find much difference in the readability of 2/3 or just the weirdness?

I think Arabic and Japanese are way out of scope right now (although the 5x5 katakana font on that site is interesting!). Latin-1 could be in scope, but if we want to talk about languages let's move to #212.

[increpare]

3rd one is most legible for me, fwiw. (I don't feel like taking them, at least not right now, but it may be useful to have the changes to hand should I change my mind, so thanks :) )

[sfiera]

Full character sets: http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=af39ffae5e027f34c00a http://sfiera.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=af39ffae5e027f34c00a

[increpare]

guess this got done innit