Extra Characters

Published on 2017-11-05 in µGame.

Initially, my font file contained only 96 characters, ignoring the “control characters” that appear in the first 32 entries of the ASCII table. I realized that this is a waste, and decided to extend my font file to cover all 128 characters, and put some special things in the first 32 glyphs. Here’s what I came up with:

The first four are arrows — always useful. Then there are icons for the two fire buttons this console has — useful when asking the player to press them. Then there is a number of random stuff that you might want to display on a status bar or in the inventory. Finally, some extra punctuation.

I’m not sure how useful this will turn out to be and if I wouldn’t be much better off if I used that space for accented characters from a few European languages — but I can never cover all the languages anyways. In the worst case I can change it, and the users can always provide their own custom fonts too — there is a script in the repository for generating the script data from a BMP file.