Thought Id post an update and a new screen shot. I have about 50% of the text parsing done and 30% of the image formatting done. It should be possible to specify via inputing a command like <ins:tga PageNum,Pos,MoveTextBool, Name.tga> in the text input box and so long as the player reading the book has the right tga have it be viable in game. A new line command <n:line> is also in and I will be adding a <n:page> command to jump to the next page at some point as well.
I havent even started on checks for translations and such yet but i do have inputing different languages seemlessly in the only draw back is that each new language starts a new line but i dont think thats too bad and should help out with everything from parsing to translating the text back to a normal font. I could eventualy use a hand logging every character of all the different fonts that need to be included if people would be interested later on but right now im just sticking to common and draconic for testing.
I also want to say thank you to White Warlock for his help in finding fonts and on the art side its much apreciated.
I could put in as many fonts as Alfa wanted, people could give me a hand gathering data for, and are not too demanding on the system.
For every font added i need a list of all the character widths for each char in that font so the book can figure out when it should start a new line. Not hard or expensive to do but time consuming. So long as some one is willing to give me a hand with that the rest is just making a new font in fontfamily, inserting the data into the scripts, and making duplicates of the text boxes i have that make use of that new font and keep with naming conventions.
I would like to add a few fun common language fonts like handwriting and such to give a more custom feel to it.
There are dethek (Faerunian dwarven runes), espruar (Faerunian elven runes) and thorass (old Faerunian human script) fonts on the net. I'll dig them up for you if you want.
These are awesome work btw. Will definitely come in handy
On indefinite real life hiatus
[22:52] <Veilan> obviously something sinister must be afoot if a DM does not have his social security number in his avatar name!
Thangorn wrote:There are dethek (Faerunian dwarven runes), espruar (Faerunian elven runes) and thorass (old Faerunian human script) fonts on the net. I'll dig them up for you if you want.
These are awesome work btw. Will definitely come in handy
Yeah. Too bad most of the ones you can find are the ugly second edition fonts and not the third edition ones.
Finaly got a chance to work a bit more on this and track down a dumb parsing bug that i couldnt figure out for ever. Getting big time to the point where i could use a hand making width tables for fonts for other languages i have some i can start handing out if any one would liek to lend a hand Shoot me a pm would go a long way to getten it done faster i have the program you need and all you need ot do is go though A-Z and all the punctuation of a font recording each chars width very easy to do just time consuming any who heres what it looks like as of right now
Stunning work- I really want to get this into the haks and working on the Live servers. One question- from the video, the page text seems to be dumping to the server chat box each time a book is opened/page turned, which would make it pretty impossible to carry on a conversation over a good book (as you'd have to scroll way up to see the last thing said). I believe we can selectively suppress messages to the player with some of the chatscript tools we have in place (currently they just monitor activity levels, but much more can be done with them). Is this something that would be helpful to implementing the books?
Oops sorry about that the random crap being output are debug msgs for me to make sure that the Parsers interpretation of the text matches the Readers. (Theyll be commented out in the end thankfully Hopefully and idealy replaced by a Gui bar representing the state of parsing the damn things are tricky though i think that i keep refreshing the page which negates any up date i do to the progress bar).)
I need to do a bunch of formatting for each page to grab where each new page begins and set the starting language eventual i will need to also check to make sure that if a player writes in a language other than common they ahve the abiity to do so. So im a little worried about how things will work as far as processing time and how cpu intensive things will be but i think i have the system set up so as to minimize that by only processing 4 lines per screen update.
I believe we can assume literacy in any language a PC is literate in, there are straightforward functions to check knowledge of a language via DMFI.
In terms of CPU overhead, when we're ready to try integrating the system into a test server, I'll run it with a script profiler and measure the CPU time for the book script(s), if they're heavy, we can look into options for optimization.
