Character map

[rodot]

That's a Microsoft X4, but i since I took this picture I felt in love with chicklets so I now use a rapoo e9080. Also the microsoft keyboard doesn't have a standard layout, as I'm switching between my desktop and laptop several times a day I wanted the same layout. Hem, it's getting out of topic.

[erico]

While working on that 3x4, I had the spectacular idea to check the internets to see if anyone ever attempted such (I thought maybe a 3x3, but here is quite hard). Guess what, there are a veery few 3x4 fonts including caps and also a 3x3 font. They are a bit different from mine but works fine as inspiration. Lot´s of symbols won´t be possible on a 3x3, but at least that is the smallest grafical way to represent words and numbers possible.

The only advantage of such smaller fonts is getting back more screen space, but you start loosing readability. Maybe it fits one´s game/app style and is useful. Like IF gfx adventures (Calixto Island I mocked).

In such a small resolution, words kind of loose a bit of room to symbols in my opinion, and that is one thing I like about this project, it pushes a need for optimum visual construction. But still, I´m not sure having a 3x4 or a 3x3 in the main CHR set is useful. Maybe they are better of as loaded sprites?

I will finish a 3x4 and 3x3 set and we check. maybe fill in those not-possible slots with tiles style gfx could work.

[Skyrunner65]

It is kinda hard to read that text.
Could you show it in its original size, or is it to scale?

[erico]

It is 4x scalled for the sake of the forum´s page. Best way to check readability (without the real hardware) is having it on a monitor and zoom to the approximate size of the gamebuino´s screen (PPI or DPI). But also consider that you usually play handhelds quite close to your eyes.

I will upload finals in real size here or on a self thread for future use as soon as I finish it. Won´t take more then a couple days now.

[erico]

It is taking more then 2 days... busy month here.

But I was wondering about the CHR map for GFX...

Now this may be a naive question but I suppose we have flipping and rotation on boat, so a 3x3 chr set for graphics, take it as tiles, could cover the whole 3x3 possibilities in 117 shapes, that is not including an ability to invert the tile. Originally, the 3x3 possibilities would be 512.

Now 117 shapes fits comfortably on our 256 sets.
Would there be a benefit?

[rodot]

As every game will require different graphics, and as you can include your own bitmaps in your games, I don't really get the point of a standard GFX char map?

[erico]

Memory maybe? But if gfx can be loaded from sd as needed, I don´t see much point into it either.
I was hoping someone would know of possible good reason for it.

[rodot]

Character map is stored in the program memory, just like bitmaps. Sorry, I don't see any good reason

[erico]

hehe, no advantages then, the question was cause back in the 8-bit days, I had a lot of trouble dealing sprites where graphics done with a CHR set were pretty much unlimited. Of course that was very specific to the COCO II I had and my only ability to code BASIC.

[BozoDel]

Let me see if I got this straight: it's a custom 7-bit encoding, so an 8 character string takes up 7 bytes instead of 8? And the character set is part of the library that is compiled into each game?

Back in the pre UTF-8 days, while ASCII characters would only take 7 bits, I think it was more common for the 8th bit to be unused, but not deleted like this. The leftover 128 characters would be used for other languages, so we had several encodings.

This is what I'm thinking about here: maybe we could have a standard 7-bit ASCII character set for English, but other standard 8-bit sets for other languages. I know people can create custom sets, but this isn't the case of per-game custom, and it can make games more easily translatable. Optimally, the IDE would be able to work in Unicode and convert at compile time.

(Chinese/Japanese/Korean are a whole different beast, I'm not going there).