Twitter discussion

[Puupertti Ruma]

EBTeam: Mini font preview? This script: http://yfrog.com/bgbase4tp results in: http://yfrog.com/11base3bp --Tellos Athenaios.

Might I ask what is Tellos doing, and why it seems to be an awfully hard way to do what he seems to be doing. If it's fonts, why not just draw the characters?

[Foot]

Might I ask what is Tellos doing, and why it seems to be an awfully hard way to do what he seems to be doing. If it's fonts, why not just draw the characters?

While possible for some areas, that wouldn't be plausible for descriptions and the like which are large, scrollable portions of text.

Foot

[Tellos Athenaios]

Might I ask what is Tellos doing,

Building a modding tool so that random modder can build his own CUF fonts. Using the tool we hope to replace the “Medieval” styled fonts with more suitable fonts for EB.

and why it seems to be an awfully hard way to do what he seems to be doing. If it's fonts, why not just draw the characters?

Well as Foot explained, simply creating pictures and hoping (against hope) that it will work is not an option in the general case. Some pieces of text simply cannot be treated that way. And imagine the pain of fixing a couple of spelling mistakes -- or... changing fonts!

And it is not actually such a hard way to do it. The script you saw doesn't just create a CUF font from a system font (UnBatang Bold, 32pt): it actually creates a version of that font that is restricted to the characters of between ' ' (whitespace) and 'ÿ' inclusive. The tool/software library is also capable of mixing multiple fonts into one; for instance I showed a screenshot in the internal EB forums of a font that had 2 different styles. At first this might seem rather redundant but the intention is that combined with a 3rd construct (mapping some characters to a different character range) you can combine 2 distinct fonts into one, so you can work around some of the limitations of the M2TW text rendering system. For instance you could create headers for paragraphs in a different font from the body of the paragraphs.

Even if that is redundant for some; the idea of creating fonts that mix glyphs from different fonts together should certainly appeal to modders who work with non-Western scripts in their mods. Most fonts that do Western scripts (and especially those that focus on ‘Latin’ scripts) tend to have poor or no support for Chinese or Arabic or basically anything that isn't Latin. The converse is true also: typically the ‘Latin’ glyphs in dedicated ‘Arabic’ typefaces are little but a copy of Arial/Helvetica or Times (New Roman). But if you were creating a mod like All Under Heaven, or Third Age Total War or say Europa Barbarorum it would be great to have high quality versions of those scripts matching the look & feel of your mod alongside each other, would it not?

[Raygereio]

What's almost sad about that is that one day I'll be playing EB2, reading the descriptions and I'll have no idea as to how much effort went in just creating that text.

[Tellos Athenaios]

What's almost sad about that is that one day I'll be playing EB2, reading the descriptions and I'll have no idea as to how much effort went in just creating that text.

And yet at the same this is true for EB 1; and will be true for everything else in EB 2 too. But it will not matter to me (nor will it to other team members, I expect) when the result is worth it.

[Paltmull]

Stay tuned! There are more coming. - JMRC
about 13 hours ago via web

[anubis88]

More of what? Whom? Where? :D

[athanaric]

More of what? Whom? Where? :D

The new Han invasion script.

[Paltmull]

More of what? Whom? Where? :D

Previews!!