Pink Petal Games
Feedback => New Features => Topic started by: sgb on December 20, 2009, 09:22:22 PM
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I think this is an important enough stat to warrant having it on the general info bars. I'm pretty sure there's enough room for it, and if not truncating it to 'Tired: ##' is fine.
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Will do.
edit-- it will fit on girls with short enough names, but the name length has always been an issue.
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Well, I have the fixed width font working now. So I can do something I've always wanted to do and get the girl management screen lined up into proper columns. Which will let me move the field names into headers, which in turn should give us a lot more space to play with.
The main trouble is finding a fixed width font that doesn't look too high-tech. I thought monofur might work, but it still looks a bit too computer-like for my taste.
I've also moved the font file definitions into config.xml, and replaced g_FontName with a fonts section in cConfig.
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More stuff to merge great. ::) At least it won't be too hard to merge this in now that they don't diverge to much.
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Well, I wanted the fixed width font so I could put a financial report on the player page. I figure detailed financial reporting is going to make finding gold bugs a lot easier. And we're going to have a few of them.
But yeah, maybe its time I started working on the trunk directly again.
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Work on the financial reports then start working on the trunk. Most of the work is due to the jobs.
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This is what I mean:
(http://content.imagesocket.com/images/winshota6d.png)
Everything lines up, and there's even room for more information (if you don't mind truncating long names, or compressing the week count for the movies). The next thing to do is shorten the list by one and add a header along the top identifying the columns. Utimately, I'd like buttons for each header, so you could sort on a column by clicking on its header. Still one step at a time...
We could do with a better fixed width font, however.
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Nice, I will try to help out there.
edit-- I went over the previous fonts you guys went over in the font handling dev thread and I like Bitsream vera though it is a tad big.
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Definately go with a different font. That shit just reminds me of DOS...
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Think about Helvetica or Futura. They're nice Sans-serif fonts that are easy to read in multiple sizes.
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It needs to be a mono-spaced font that we can freely distribute.
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Which is of course where the problems start. I had to try quite a few fonts just to find one that works this well. And the player home screen looks worse :(
The alternative (assuming we want the table to work in columns) is to use composite fields, however you do that in SDL. I could read up on the problem but we probably have higher priotities.
Alternatively, if anyone wants to evaluate some fonts for me, I can upload a development snapshot. Just copy the ttf file into the game folder and edit config.xml
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What about creating real columns instead of faking it with fixed width fonts? Design it as a spreadsheet rather than as a text file and you don't have to worry about using fixed width fonts.
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That's what I was saying above: It's the best solution, but I don't know how to do it, off hand. SDL isn't like vb where you just drag a control in from a pallette.
I seriously do need to read up on some SDL and get my head around how this game works at a graphical level, on the other hand, so maybe that's the thing to do. On the other hand we have a ton of other stuff needs doing that I do know how to do...
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I have a basic understanding of how sdl works, but right now I am deep in job related code that needs to be done.
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I shall consult the Great God Google tomorrow morning.
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Here a good sdl tutorial that I have looked over and been meaning to actually go over it depth to learn sdl.
http://www.lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/ (http://www.lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/)
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OK, thanks. That's helpful.
Not as complicated as I'd worried that it might be, but then it's still not going to be easy.
Maybe I should just forget about making another 1.29.4 release and start the final merge with 1.30.
[edit]
Of course there are other options. We could use a third party GUI package. Agar (http://libagar.org/screenshots.html.en), for instance is free, BSD licenced, and looks pretty slick. Downside is we'd need to rewrite pretty much everything to use it, and that could take quite a while.
Or we could just forget the whole thing, and go back to ragged lines of proportional text
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For now lets stick with ragged lines of proportional text and work on the more important matters.
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For now lets stick with ragged lines of proportional text and work on the more important matters.
I suppose. I was just thinking, we could render the text onto its own surface, and then blit it on to the table using a rectangle sized for the field. Easiest way is probably to specify a table header with percentage values for each column. Then we have text that will truncate properly and won't run off the end of the table. The tables we have don't do that, and someone should really log a bug about that.
If we do that, we can use the scrolling stuff necno already wrote, or at least with fairly little modification.
But maybe you're right. Time I was in bed anyway.
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Right. I've unpicked the changes that render the lists and the player screen in fixed width font, and I've taken the financial report stuff out of the player screen. It doesn't work yet and there's no way anyone was going to be able to read it without a monospaced font.
I think I've also figured out why my previous attemtps at merging having worked so well. I don't suppose you have the revision number of the last time you did a merge by any chance?
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170 I think. Let me check. Yeah 170 for the branch, and 171 for the trunk on the most recent merge.
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OK. I'll try and merge in changes from 172 onwards then
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Good luck, I will continue working on the jobs.
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maybe align it to the right, if it's not a chalange, then at least everything lines up. I don't know how difficult this will be, but what about allowing the characters to have two lines, so that one name is on one, the other on the next (or is that in the spread sheet catigory?)
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The trouble with right-alignment is we can only sanely do that against a character position. And without a monospaced font, the right borders would still be ragged, even though the lines were the same lenght.
That said, we could probably do something with evaluating the rendered length of text strings in pixels and truncating the string until it fit. But then I'd still end up blitting the text elements onto the line - so easier to just truncate them as part of the blit, really.