ALFA Books Reading & Writing

Kest · Post by **Kest** » Tue May 27, 2008 6:50 am

Espruar - http://razorwing.deviantart.com/art/Esp ... on-3020856
Dethek - http://www.thyle.net/fonts/

I can't find the 3rd Ed. Thorass alphabet.

ç i p h é r · Post by **ç i p h é r** » Tue May 27, 2008 6:39 pm

Cool. Can the book use up less screen space though?

AcadiusLost · Post by **AcadiusLost** » Tue May 27, 2008 7:07 pm

I kind of like the near-fullscreen book GUI. Means you can be buried in a book and not notice someone walking past until they emote clearing their throat, heh. On a practical level, I worry if we go too small with it, the text will be really limited in amount per page, or the font will get too small to be easily legible.

bartleby · Post by **bartleby** » Tue May 27, 2008 7:29 pm

I like the full screen better myself (thought it was more immersive) but i definitly also wouldl ike to have custom sizes. It should be possible to set the GUI screen to be scaleable by the PC which would probably be the best solution but its difficult to parse the text properly in full screen mode as it is. (As basicly the idea right now is to just have an arbitrary cut off for text length per page.) Changing the size of the box that is going to display the text will probably present problems.

I think I may end up having to go with my worse case senario and make a Text box for every letter on the page that gets updated from a main string everytime the page is turned. Kind of like a printing press. The problem with that though is that it wont look as fluid as a solid text field. And im not sure if it will or will not be scaleable i know i can make the text feilds scale down but im not sure if the text in them would as well i thought i saw an option that would do that but i dont recall right now ... But a plus is that you can have mixed and matched fonts/languages active and translateable within one page this way.

Ill have to do some experementation and see how it looks

Wynna · Post by **Wynna** » Tue May 27, 2008 7:36 pm

This is wonderful.

ç i p h é r · Post by **ç i p h é r** » Tue May 27, 2008 10:25 pm

I'd recommend that you forgo scaling and try instead to find a happy medium. Hopefully that'll save you precious time.

Practically speaking, the problem with a book that big is that it'll need a lot of text to fill up all the white space on screen. Playability is more subjective, but it too is an important consideration of any UI design.

bartleby · Post by **bartleby** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 7:46 am

A few questions and an update

Question 1 do variables that are saved to an item that a player has in their inventory get saved when the character is saved? I currently have the text a book contains and a few other logistical varables save onto the book object but when i made a local save of my char and went to read the book the text was no where to be seen. If i need to redirect the reading and writing of the text body some where else how hard would that be?

Question 2 How much would people like to have a fully integrated system with seperate fonts for seperate languages that can be translated if a char knows the language or has the correct spell and or written in by the PC him or her self with notes as well? A lot a little who cares?

Update

Right now I have a system that takes a string in and parses through it spliting it up into 30 lines per side to be displayed on a book background. The parser works by compairing relative character widths to a table which would allow rather cumbersomly for multiple fonts to apear as if they were within the same box by overlaping text boxes and padding them to the correct widths with spaces.

I dont know how costly in cpu cycles this would be though so ive tried right now to limit the processing of the text to 4 lines per GUI refresh. I dont think it should be that hard to process 60 lines of text though.

I will try to get a no multi language support version up and running first though as multi will probably take some time i have to do a lot of work to measure each character in all the different fonts.

darrenhfx · Post by **darrenhfx** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 3:45 pm

Looks amazing!

Teric neDhalir · Post by **Teric neDhalir** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 9:56 pm

That's looking mighty fine, Bartleby!

Books in different languages would be completely fab, too (Items that are only readable by characters with the right language are something that I've thought about, would like, but don't know how to implement).

Keep up the good work,
Teric

White Warlock · Post by **White Warlock** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 12:25 am

Excellent Bartleby. And i volunteer to produce content, or type out content from sources should you need the assist once this becomes part of ALFA.

Btw, are you able to produce a 'single-page' note with the same language features, or is that already in?

bartleby · Post by **bartleby** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 5:50 am

Thanks for the words of encouragment! And help getting more content in once the frame work is set up would be most apreciated.

Hopefully in the end there will be two types of books and or parcments or writing mediums. The first that is completely player modifiable that stores its text on the book object itself and the second thats text is indexed by its item name and is retrived from a .tlk file or other external database via script whose text is not modifiable to be used for store bought "offical" RP books. Which would help out standardizing books as all you would need to do is name an activateable object with the apropriate tag the apropriate name. But I have no idea what books would be good to have or where to find them or their text. Also any text that was supposed to be in another language would need to be formatted by hand to be in the right languages.

Adding parchment should be easy and exactly the same as a book to make too all id need to do is remove a UIPane resize the Main GUI and make a different background all very easy to do.

Magonushi · Post by **Magonushi** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 5:16 pm

Wowie!

White Warlock · Post by **White Warlock** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 11:25 am

The link to Espruar provided above (to the font download) is broken.

Here's another source -- http://hometown.aol.com/semberholme/espruar3.zip

Note: there is an older espruar in the links below, should you want it for 'wild elves' or something.

Here's the Thorass font (not sure what version, or if it matters) -- http://www.fonts4free.net/dsplus/m.php?p=thorass.zip

Another source -- http://www.dafont.com/thorass.font

Excellent collection -- http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/al ... fonts1.htm

Here are others that might work out fine (orcish, etc):
http://www.acondia.com/fonts/WhiteSilve ... index.html
http://www.acondia.com/fonts/assorted/index.html
http://www.fantasyfonts.com/fonts/hobbi ... h_hand.zip
http://www.acondia.com/fonts/index.html
http://www.everwinter.com/archives/fonts/
http://www.candlekeep.com/library/treasures.htm#Fonts

player-created elven -- http://www.rpghoard.com/cgi-bin/arcdb.c ... dl&id=1308

Common Tongue (thorass) -- http://www.thievesguild.cc/fonts/index. ... .zip&sec=3

Witches Alphabet -- http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/276 ... theban.zip

Celtic Tree Alphabet - http://members.tripod.com/~louras/files/Ogham.ZIP

http://members.tripod.com/~louras/files/endankai.ZIP
http://members.tripod.com/~louras/files/chlanou.ZIP
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Rampart ... ngerth.zip

White Warlock · Post by **White Warlock** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 11:52 am

Drow Rounded -- http://www.angelfire.com/pq/Urhixidur/Fonts/Drow.zip
Drow Angular -- http://www.angelfire.com/pq/Urhixidur/F ... ngular.zip

At the bottom are some house glyphs/runes -- http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/vortexsha ... runes.html

ç i p h é r · Post by **ç i p h é r** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 7:12 pm

Wow. That's really impressive.

Yes, variables on items in a character's inventory should be saved along with the character, but I believe this only works in multiplayer mode. If you want the text to be truly persistent, you'll want to use the database. You can find information on ACR persistence functions in the tech wiki, here:

http://www.alandfaraway.org/docs/Techni ... ersistence

Each book will need to have a unique tag to store data in the database, naturally.