Raydium 3D Game Engine

I already know that with the font2text application, teorically, you can render a font into a TGA file.
I compiled it and I thought that it worked with 512 or smaller textures, but no. Font2text is not working anyway.
Even if no crash the tga created is absolutely unreadable.

So could someone create a few tga textures (as big as possible) with these fonts for me? (maybe the app works in other computer)
Thanks

The thread about this mmater: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=842
The link to the font2text: http://frustum.org/misc/data/other/file/font2tex.tar.gz
The fonts I want to convert into TGA texture: http://www.guadagames.com/versusrx/fonts.tar.bz2

http://pangototga.berlios.de/

font to tga for game applications

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Ouch what a sadness....
That application looked great, however the result file (after a bit tunning to be raydium compatible) was not usable.
All the characters are left aligned and in general bad positioned, so is not useful

I've managed to create a new Raydium compatible 512x512 TGA font file using an ugly way, but it works.

This example font is intended to be used for the console: font4.tga Look and see!
IMHO, it looks much better than the "official" font2.tga one on higher resolutions and is may be a little bit to small for 800x600 and lower resolutions.

Short How-To create a new font:
1. I'd to emulate a Windows session to use this tool: Bitmap Font Generator VirtualBox was my friend.

As you can see on this picture the program has exactly the Raydium font alignments.


2. You have to install the fonts under Windows. (e. g. right-click on the TTF or FON file and 'Install...')
3. Select your favorite font and disable UNICODE to get a greater canvas!
4. Now the ugly part, don't use the regular export to TGA function, since this will export an unusable file for Raydium (I was not able to get this working), we will take a picture instead.
5. Resize the window to get the canvas area 512x512 or higher, try to keep the 1:1 aspect ratio.
6. Take a screenshot and cut the canvas with your favorite image manipulation program. (e. g. The GIMP)
7. Invert the colors.
8. Fix the boxes not including a character of the font with black color.
9. Remove the alpha channel.
10. Set the image from RGB to grayscale.
11. Resize to 512x512 if necessary and test it with Raydium.

I hope this little "How-To" will help you to reach your goal.

Very useful, thanks ! Wasn't it possible to save the file to a standard image format and then open the file with, let say, GIMP and save it again, this time as a Raydium compliant TGA file ?

edit: you're right, this font4 looks good in fullscreen, but is hardly readable in small windows. Maybe can we generate again font2 with this application ?

No, in order to avoid misunderstandings: You can configure and set the (export) options of the program as much as you like, but it never looks nearly the same as in the preview (canvas).
The Raydium specific character alignments are broken and the resulting image file looks everytime something like this:


Yeah, good idea, I'll try to recreate ... but do you have any idea what font actually was used for font2.tga?
WhatTheFont?! gives to many different results. What font should I use to recreate font2.tga?

This package includes all fonts, they are all Raydium ready: fonts.tar.gz (font4.tga, bitstream.tga, gilgongo.tga, komika.tga, steve.tga, toontime.tga)

OK about the differences between preview and saved image, I misread your previou post.

About font2.tga, I think it's "Lucida" (probably console, typewriter, or something like that).

edit: nice pack, with some funny ones

It's Lucida Console, exactly!

Differences between old and new font:

Here is the new one, which IMHO looks much cleaner in-game with high and also low resolutions: font2.tga

Nice ! The new one looks less blocky, and have a better anti-aliasing. I've uploaded the new file to the repository.

So, to all: wait an hour (to let the mirror do its job) and delete your font2.tga file

Great! Thanx you