Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 6454
Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06
Monster weapons in console
dpeg wrote:The interface problem about monster weapon extends beyond polearms. We would also like to see presence of egos. I thought that unicode accents on monster glyphs should work, but it seems this is impossible or hard to do.
As someone who has dealt with unicode accents and software rendering for many years, I can tell you that one of the problems this sort of thing would have is that most consoles (indeed most programs, actually) don't properly implement multi-character (e.x. 'a symbol followed by a joining accent mark') unicode characters, usually they leave it at "transpose the pair of characters it to a pre-rendered glyph which has the accent already with the character" if they don't simply ignore the joining aspect of the accent mark (And of course the half-assed solution only works if there *is* such a character in the font you're using, which is only true for a small handful of characters used in several languages)
Even if you could add all the code properly, it'd only work in limited circumstances, and with only certain fonts (The lack of a plethora of monospaced unicode fonts for all platforms is also an issue) Sounds horrible to me, unfortunately (because otherwise it'd be a great way to implement indicators for all sorts of things in console)