It required sacrificing a lot of portability (the script now outputs the SVG file from Cairo, opens it and tweaks the XML directly, saves it again, then fires up Inkscape to automatically do some path operations), but none of the pure-Cairo ways I tried worked for Fontforge.
I’ve also toyed with decreasing the width of the characters, so that the boxes would be closer to 2:1 than 3:1, but that squished the diagonal lines in an unappealing way. This is designed to go in a Z-machine status bar, so I’ll always have more horizontal space than vertical space available anyway.
Time to stop stalling and actually put it in a game!
[ ] ( ) ^ ←-(?)-( ) ( )
d \ | | | x |
( )+(~)-(A)-(#)-( )-{.}-(?)
u | | : |
(!)-(.) v (@)-
I would prefer to use a capital X for the crossed diagonals, but I’m trying to specifically leave the capital letters intact so that authors can label rooms with them. (For example, you might use the first letter of an NPC’s name to show their location.) It’s an edge case, anyway; I don’t think a single one of my Dialog automaps has ever had crossed diagonals in it.
Now, if I could just get rid of those white hairlines between the rows…
Just seeing this thread and this looks really cool! I’m going to have to properly catch up on what’s going on here, because I’m a fan of maps in games…
As I work on my portfolio for job purposes, I’m going back and putting a bunch of my little projects on Github.
Which includes this one! You can get the fonts and their generating script there. You can also see the latest experiment, “Cartography Narrow”, which makes for more square boxes.
I’m going to guess Zork III just on the off-chance Draconis might be wrong. But yeah, never played Dungeon that far but did play ZIII, and I can see the sandstone.
The Dusty Path from A Dark Room. Fun game, used to play a lot and still sometimes do. Though, might not be what you’re looking for. Edit: Oh, sorry, I didn’t see this was an old thread!
Thread necroing is generally fine here and preferred to creating new threads. “29 days later” is not even much by Intfiction standards; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen “15 years later” in the middle of a thread before.
I don’t think going around deliberately resurrecting ancient threads is going to be popular, but I’d be interested to see who can find the longest hiatus in an existing thread.
Agree with Adam, but one should not forget that very often old programming ideas & concept can be valid again.
More generally, is the so-called engineering concept of “reincarnation cycle”; for example, the (war)ships’s bow shapes are returning to late XIXth/early XXth century shapes, if not even much earlier (look up the prow of Italian Di Revel class for a shocking & unbelievable example…)
But yeah, never played 