Bitmap font support gone in Quest 5.4 Beta?

MadDogBV

06 Mar 2013 21:36

I recently upgraded to the latest Beta of Quest and was saddened to find that the bitmap font that I preferred to use for my games was no longer accessible - only vector-based (i.e. TTF) fonts were accessible both in the game editor and player. Is the removal of support for bitmap fonts permanent?

sgreig

06 Mar 2013 22:42

I'm kind of confused by what you mean by bitmap font. Quest has always supported either whatever fonts are installed on your computer, or the webfonts from Google, neither of which are bitmap fonts. Bitmap fonts are drawn in an image editor and stored in a sprite sheet to be used for in-game text.

If a font is no longer available I can only assume either you've removed it from your system or Google removed it from their webfont repository for some reason.

MadDogBV

06 Mar 2013 23:05

That's odd... The font is still on my computer. The issue is that, while programs like WordPad don't have a problem detecting the font, Quest no longer allows it to be selected - whereas it used to, in the past.

homeeman

07 Mar 2013 00:26

It appeared to me that in Quest 5.3 the font selection menu switched from fonts that were installed on your computer to font-families that were in common use, since others wouldn't be able to see fonts that were only installed on your computer. If you want to use your special font, though, you could use an html document with your font as the first one in the font-family for the body. Does that help?

MadDogBV

18 Mar 2013 20:51

I'm not having any luck with this. I've tried editing the .ASLX files to force the font, but it doesn't work. Any suggestions? Is there a temporary fix I can implement to get the editor to use fonts installed on my PC?

If it helps any, I'm referring to files with the .FON extension. The editor no longer detects those; it detects .TTF or similar.

homeeman

19 Mar 2013 04:33

How exactly are you editing the .aslx to get the font to work? Did you try the "insert html document" as a start script?

The html document should just have <body> tags with the font family in them (I can't remember exactly how you do that right now, but I promise it's super easy, and it never hurts to learn some basic html).

jaynabonne

19 Mar 2013 12:14

I downloaded a sample Bitmap font and did some tests.

I put a simple "SetFontFace" command in with some output text, and the output text does not show the proper font. However, looking at the HTML generated, the proper font name is in the span tag, so it's up the player/renderer to show the font or not.

I also published the Quest game and submitted it to the web site. When played in a web browser, it also does not show the font - and that's strictly a feature of the web browser.

My take: web browsers do not display bitmap fonts. If you can get the font to show up in a web browser, then it should show up in Quest (since the offline player is basically a web browser).

I believe the offline player has been changed to be more like the onine one. Were you able to publish your game to the web site before and see the font?

jaynabonne

19 Mar 2013 12:30

An addendum: you can now use Google Web Fonts in Quest (largely). There is a new font API: SetWebFontName (as opposed to the earlier SetFontName). It is exposed in the script editor as "Change Font (using web fonts)". This gives you a much broader selection of fonts. Perhaps you can find something there you like. I seriously doubt that even in earlier versions of Quest, your bitmap font would have been supported for web publishing. (But, of course, I could be wrong!

)

The fonts can be see here: http://www.google.com/webfonts

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Bitmap font support gone in Quest 5.4 Beta?

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