The Mana World Forums

First a question before I post my suggestion:
Are we using a pixel based font system or a TTF?

The eAthena client only supports bitmap fonts but the TMWServ client already uses both.

Ok ... can I suggest that we use bitmap fonts exclusively. My reason is that it's easier to "skin" your client by making a bitmap font as opposed to having to buy expensive software to make a true type font. Plus adding things like borders, drop shadows, etc. means having to add a true type effects engine to the type renderer, as opposed to just displaying a bitmap. We could use the image dying system to allow players to change the colors of the text in the console, the numbers displayed when damage is dealt, etc.

I can make a nice monospace font for the console that can also be used for damage display. Using a monospace font I say that each character is composed of at least 3 separate images: A base image for the actual character (solid black with an alpha-channel, used for display of the character in the console/damage), a border image for a border around the character primarily for damage, and a 3D outline basically used for damage display to make the text stand out. Keeping these images separate can mean that we can overlay one character with another when we bounce the characters around with the particle engine.

It'd be nice if we can come up with some other way to define text strings other than ASCII, also. ASCII has characters that we wouldn't use like TAB, LINEFEED, and alot of the characters from 126 up to 256. We may need some of the international characters, maybe. But the reason we don't use the ASCII char. set allows us to have multiple versions of numbers, for varying levels of damage (kinda like in Secret of Mana), as well as other characters that aren't in the ASCII table but we might use (like Emotes, maybe an extra set of uppercase characters that can be used for displaying important names/places that should stick out from other text, characters for different currencies, etc.).

I recommend the following character chart:
00-11 = Currency characters (since you have 8 races gives you the option for each race to have its own currency, plus 4 extra just in case)
12-22 = small numbers 0-9
23-33 = medium numbers 0-9
34-44 = large numbers 0-9 (for critical hits)
44-71 = lowercase characters from a-z
72-98 = uppercase characters A-Z
99-125 = special set of uppercase letters A-Z that will stick out
... the rest should be emotes, punctuation and international char's ...

Also kinda along the same line, can the server have language channels added to it. Kinda like how a DVD has a video track and multiple language tracks, you're client specifies what language to listen to while everybody watches the same "video" if you will. That way you don't have to see someone talk in a language that you can't read/understand anyway. This also could be good for server messages (like stating the server will be under maintenance from 2am to 3am or that a quest has been opened/closed), any kind of feedback from the server to the client can be preprogrammed into the client's string tables in the multiple languages and is shown in the language you are listening to.

For the trunk client we decided that we needed to switch to TrueType fonts, mainly because it's internationalized, unicode-based and being translated into many languages, some of which do not use the Latin alphabet. It's not really doable to draw nice-looking bitmap fonts for all the necessary characters. What we can do instead I think is to support font effects like drop shadow and outline, and we can look for nicer looking TrueType fonts.

What about the damage display numbers ... are those gonna be true type or are they gonna stay bitmaps.

They are likely to stay bitmap fonts because they don't need unicode support.