Check this out and comment please!

[FinnPanther]

I've made a nice little program that can read "fonts" from bitmaps.
That is, say, if you are making a game and don't wan't to use the normal fonts (because they look boring and are too clumsy) and you have a really good looking pic of alphabets and would like to use it for making the texts to the game, but you don't know how to, then this program is for you.

This program converts almost any text (it understands 96 different characters now) to the "font" you have in your bitmap-file. Check it out, and send feedback!

BMPFont 1.0

[FinnPanther]

And just in case you wonder "whatta hell this font looks like Terminal!" then don't wonder anymoere: it is Terminal, but it is read from the ABC.bmp. I spent only about 5 hours to make this program, so I didn't have time to draw a font (yet).

[DaoK]

Add a keypress event in the text box than when you press Enter that will made the same thing as you click the button.

[Jotaf98]

Hey, that's cool, but wouldn't it be better if instead of hard-coding the characters positions, you just had a 16 characters X 16 characters bitmap? That way you would have all possible 256 characters in the bitmap

[FinnPanther]

Well, this version has the flexible options ment to be (the v.1 was really buggy... just noticed). This one is quite simple also, because it doesn't use the "virtual" DC's to store the bitmap (this is because i couldn't get the program to read the bitmap's colour depth without "violence" ).

And, finally there is a nice little font example included. You have to see it yourself... And the character mapping in the bmp-file is more flexible also: you can just put a zero-width character in to your bmp to avoid empty spaces and the program reads lower case letters as upper case letters if you don't have them drawn (why make the file size double it's original?).

Comments, please

The new link is,
BMPFont2.zip

[FinnPanther]

Originally posted by Jotaf98
Hey, that's cool, but wouldn't it be better if instead of hard-coding the characters positions, you just had a 16 characters X 16 characters bitmap? That way you would have all possible 256 characters in the bitmap

Oh, forgot to answer to this:

Yep it would be nice, but: this way you couldn't make the characters different size (or at least without any violonce...)

So... go and downloand the version 2.0!

[Jotaf98]

Cool

If that is to be used in games, you'd better use the 256 characters, you know? Like, we could modify an unused character to be the health symbol (something like a red + ), so instead of having in the text of a potion "Restores 10 health", it would appear as "Restores 10[health symbol goes here]"

[FinnPanther]

Originally posted by Jotaf98
Cool

If that is to be used in games, you'd better use the 256 characters, you know? Like, we could modify an unused character to be the health symbol (something like a red + ), so instead of having in the text of a potion "Restores 10 health", it would appear as "Restores 10[health symbol goes here]"

Good idea Actually I was too thinking something like that but got into this result: who actually draws all of the 116 characters to the bmp-file? I mean, there are some rare mathematical symbols there and I bet no-one uses 'em all. So, of course you can draw any kind of alphabets (hey, what about a new language ie. klingon? ) you want to. I was going to make the full 256 char support, but again, who uses them all...

BTW: Would you happen to know how to use the FMod module?
I'm planning to make the sounds/musics with it because it can play many wavs at time and it can play FastTracker 2's extended modules (XM). I would make the sounds with wavmix or something like that but the musics are the problem: I don't know any other vb based thingy that can play XMs. If you know there is some thread etc. about it, please let me know

[Sastraxi]

search the web for an FMOD wrapper for Visual Basic, or a COM component, or a _stdcall DLL, or an ActiveX DLL/OCX. All can be used by Visual Basic, however I advise you do find an ActiveX DLL of it, as it is the easiest and fastest to use.

[FinnPanther]

Originally posted by Sastraxi
search the web for an FMOD wrapper for Visual Basic, or a COM component, or a _stdcall DLL, or an ActiveX DLL/OCX. All can be used by Visual Basic, however I advise you do find an ActiveX DLL of it, as it is the easiest and fastest to use.

Uh... aaaaaa..... do you mean the fmod.dll by this???
Of course I have all of the fmod components (for all of the languages it can handle) but I have a little problem: when I try to load a module it says something like division by zero and stops executing. So I don't know the exact way to call the functions, thanks to the (in some cases) bad help files.

Well... have to check out the web if someone would have written a more specific help for it

[Sastraxi]

Oh.. you must have a different version as earlier versions worked only in C++...

[Jotaf98]

FinnPanther: Well I've seen games that use the 256 characters in an image, and they just leave the ones that don't matter empty