grrk-bzzt {l Wrote}:After several discussions I had with samuncle, we repeatedly expressed how bad the STK font was and how it could be improved.
It seems that there's two major constraints that makes it incredibly difficult to just pick a new font.
1/ Apparently it is difficult to chnage the font in game because it has to be converted to bitmap first (I'm not sure if there's an automatic tool for that).
With the stk sources we also include the fonttool, which is used to convert a system font into bitmaps (and to create an xml file describing the font). This is a somewhat extended version of irrlicht's fonttool (our version can be told not to create bitmaps of all characters, but only of the ones used in certain translations. We use this to reduce the size of the bitmaps for Asian fonts). Just specify -DFONT_TOOL=yes in cmake (or select the checkbox in the advanced section in the cmake gui to build this tool). In this tool select the font you want to use, the size (usually 24), size of the bitmap (for Asian fonts we use 512x512), png format and output filename. Then click on create, then save.
Then copy the created files into stk-code/data/fonts. To test a font as GUI font, just copy the created xml file to StkFont.xml, and start STK.
2/ Apparently the project leaders want a font that support all possible glyphs at all cost
In my humble opinion, I think reason 2 holds everything back and is a near-impossible constraint to get around since there's very few (none?) fonts that can do that.
This is indeed part of the problem. If STK would only come with English, many problems would be easier (e.g. cardinal letters: 1st, ...). We've also implemented a reasonable fallback system where we can pick characters from a different font if they are missing (not that this looks good though
).
I would be happy to spent some more time on the font support, if we should get a better luck from it. One example could be to use a special font to display the rank in a race ('1st' etc. ) - a font with just 20 entries (which is the maximum number of karts). Each language could then supply its own way for those cardinal numbers, and as fallback we would just use "1." (or even just "1").
Suggestions welcome.
...
It's nothing more than a Sans font with a black border.
So I try to render some words with the
GNU FreeSans font in the same style.
I choosed FreeSans because, it is free and open-source, it aims at supporting the maximum glyphs possible and it looks very similar to the font used in this screenshot.
You should be able to actually see the font in race with the above instructions, let me know if something doesn't work. That might help with the decision
Cheers,
Joerg