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Coraline

Heretic Menu Typeface -> GFX

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Hi all,

I'm writing support for Heretic in 3DGE, but currently the engine does not support writing text to the menus. As such, it is only graphic based and I intend to keep it that way, and do not plan on writing the code that Heretic possesses for the feature.

The only viable way to display the Menu correctly (the M_ graphics, if you will) is if I capture the Heretic typeface and insert it in as a graphic. Obviously these will be kept in edge2.wad to be used when needed.

In the video below, you can see the menu at about the 4 second mark - this is how it currently looks because it cannot find the graphics to normally display the menu:



The ultimate question here is that by doing this, will it violate any copyright? Since this is only the current way of doing this, I wanted to be sure before I include it in a fixed wadfile. I know this is sort of a deprecated way of going about it, but community input would be appreciated before I commit.

Thanks!

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Doom's graphic-based text system is pretty stupid, and Heretic got it right by doing it as a font. I have no idea why you would want to stubbornly stick to that system. Is it so much effort to just add text string support to the menu system?

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I've never attempted it before. Well, I know where my Sunday night is going. Thanks for the feedback dude.

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Ouch!

Writing a font output routine is work that needs to be done once.

Replacing all text with graphics is an invitation for endless trouble.

Furthermore, what if some mod replaces the font?

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Chu said:

I've never attempted it before. Well, I know where my Sunday night is going. Thanks for the feedback dude.

Since you're GPL, I'd encourage you to take a look here:

http://mancubus.net/svn/eternity/trunk/source/v_font.cpp

This is EE's generic font engine. Fonts have their basic properties defined via EDF (though no reason you can't hard code them in the engine if that's easier) and all other text drawing calls in the engine are just thunks to get to V_FontDrawTextEx. Routines are also provided to calculate the width and height of strings in a given font.

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We have the hu_font (green and white) and B_font (big-red) code in DoomLegacy, so I suppose you could start by looking there. Anything you did would not be much different.

My current pain with this is that HU_Init loads the hu_font, and does an I_Error if any are not found. Each font char is a patch. This requires that some wad loaded has the hu_font patches. The hu_font is different for doom2 and heretic, with different font names, and there is some adjustment in the DoomLegacy routines.

I want to put up some error messages and get input before the fonts are loaded, so I am working on adding a built-in font within DoomLegacy.
I am making it a bit map font, but could have made compiled in patches too.
Cannot do that with graphic names. It will also be able to put up messages when the hu_font is not present.

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