Temple of The Roguelike Forums

Development => Programming => Topic started by: XLambda on June 10, 2012, 09:57:56 PM

Title: Do you prefer square or non-square fonts?
Post by: XLambda on June 10, 2012, 09:57:56 PM

This one came up while I was playing through my RL collection. Some games, especially libtcod ones, favor square fonts. Many others seem to go for non-square ones. Both have clear advantages and disadvantages.

I guess with so many graphics solutions offering both, it's a matter of preference. So I'd like to know what the people around here prefer.

Myself, I prefer a non-square one with a high x-height. Preferably along the lines of DF's 12x16. It doesn't distort the dungeon dimensions too much and is more legible than square fonts.

Title: Re: Do you prefer square or non-square fonts?
Post by: Kyzrati on June 11, 2012, 01:16:15 AM

Hm, can't really put in my vote because the option's not there--probably because what I think is not very often done with an ASCII console: both simultaneously.

Square fonts are great for the map because there's no distorsion, but they're horrible for reading text. Reading blocks of text in libTCOD games is very, very annoying. Characters are meant to be taller than they are wide, and your eyes are used to reading and recognizing shapes of words, so square-font text really suffers in parsability.

Ideally you have your map using square fonts, and the text drawn with tall fonts, though obviously this approach only works if you've got an engine that supports it. (It's also not very traditional, since console terminals can't do this.)

For a readability comparison, check out this post (http://xcomrl.blogspot.com/2012/05/tune-up.html) I put up about the square/tall mix I implemented for X@COM. The map is still square, but text windows are all done with narrow-width fonts which make it sooooo much more readable.  I've heard that Brogue is looking into taking the same approach (even though it uses libTCOD, which doesn't support that feature--don't know how they're gonna do it without a pretty significant engine refactor).

Title: Re: Do you prefer square or non-square fonts?
Post by: Ancient on June 12, 2012, 09:26:25 AM

In a true console mode you can't have both so having to choose I prefer square fonts. No distortion in map is worth more to me than more pleasant reading. Xenocide is designed with that in mind.

However, when having the luxury of operating in graphical environment mixing both is very good idea.

Title: Re: Do you prefer square or non-square fonts?
Post by: guest509 on June 12, 2012, 10:05:07 AM

  Whatever Jeff Lait uses, I think his 7DRL games are very easy on the eyes.