Anyone looking at improving the text?

[dajt]

Hi,

I tried VS again today and one of the first things that struck me was how hard it is to read any of the rendered text in the game.

Searching through the forums I also found that the current system doesn't support localisation very well due to GLUT's limited character set.

I was working on font/localisation code for Oolite using FTGL, before giving it away due to (a) lack of interest and (b) FTGL being C++ and Oolite being Objective-C, but did get it working. Here are screenshots of a Russian example and a Norwegian example.

I know there is some work going on with the Ogre port, but it seems to have stalled. Is it worth looking at replacing the text rendering in the standard source (using a different branch) to make it more readable and able to handle non-latin characters?

If so, I assume VS already handles unicode strings, even if they're UTF-8?

[ace123]

No, it doesn't hadnle UTF-8 correctly, however UTF-8 is binary-safe, so it shouldn't cause anything bad to happen if it's there.

I would translate into UTF-8 if possible, and then we might be able to add unicode support (I'm sure it's possible with the bitmap font at least).

[klauss]

I know there is some work going on with the Ogre port, but it seems to have stalled. Is it worth looking at replacing the text rendering in the standard source (using a different branch) to make it more readable and able to handle non-latin characters?

Yes, it's both possible and worth it, probably. There's still one release planned to use the standard engine.
What's needed is first a set of bitmap fonts, and then a text rendering procedure using those bitmap fonts. It's fairly easy, but quite a boring task.
If you want to try your luck at it, it's a bit of OpenGL coding into src/gfx/hud.cpp - TextPlane::Draw() (don't worry, nothing too complex).
Feel free to PM me if you need pointers.