Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition

[dode74]

Hey all, first time user accepting

It's an old game but has a pretty horrible UI, so I want to try to freshen it up. This is the current UI:


I came across this (just a photoshop concept, sadly) which gave me the inspiration:


A look at the internals of the current UI shows me that this is the system the developers used. A bit of reverse engineering allowed me to create new graphics and insert them into the UI, which gives me confidence I can adapt the current UI into something approaching the one above. I'm no artist, but I do know people who are, and the designer of the above has said he will be able to provide the graphics he used, while my other artists will be able to create whatever is needed to fill in the missing bits of the concept UI, and I know I can put them in the game as needed. So basically, I think I can do almost all I need to do once I have the graphical resources.

The issue I have is with fonts. I can see how fonts are assigned and called, but they are all truetype fonts and those obviously aren't 3d like the one in the concept UI. Flat fonts really leave something to be desired, imo, so I was wondering if anyone might know a fairly easy way to use some sort of 3d font like the one above.

[Ident]

Hello,

Thanks for this project announcement and for informing us of the fact that this former unmodified version of the game used our library!

About your font request I can give you a quick solution, although it actually would belong in a separate thread discussion. You can render your font however you want in 3D and save it as a CEGUI imageset that can be used with a PixmapFont. So first you create your own texture of font glyphs, with a transparent background (I assume you want that). After that you can define your CEGUI .font file based on this imageset. See FairChar-30.font in the CEGUI datafiles for reference, it is a PixmapFont. Also look at FairChar.imageset. See http://static.cegui.org.uk/docs/current ... pFont.html for the class documentation of PixmapFonts.
If you want to create a imageset i heavily recommend you to use our CEED tool, you can use snapshot 11 for the latest CEGUI imageset versions. It allows you to visually create the images for the characters, on top of the texture you made and defined in your imageset file.

[dode74]

Thanks for your answer. I just found an online font generator which produces the .font and .png files (http://kvazars.com/littera/) and will take a look at how to use pixmaps. As a total beginner I expect to be asking more questions, but I will try to keep this post updated.

Hope I didn't get anyone in trouble by telling you that they were using your library!

[Ident]

No, they are free to use it, but they have to include the license information. If the license information is added to their source and also added to their release version this is totally fine. If not it is very very unfair considering how much time was put into this library by CEGUI team members and ex-members as well as the community as a whole. Adding the appropriate CEGUI license file is a very small thing to ask for which only shows that they use our library. It is especially small considering they can use our library for free and modify it as they want to, and this library has tens of thousands of dollars of work put into it, if measured according to the work hours people spent on it and the pay they would get in a job doing similar work. Also it is an infringement of copyright an therefore illegal.
But no, no trouble, we wont pursue any actions regarding this when it comes to games. Also you didn't say if they didn't actually add the license files anyways. Also Torchlight for example added the correct license. And you did nothing bad by reporting this, quite the opposite because now that we know they use us we got the benefit that can add them to our projects list, and can show off a bigger usage of our library. We re working on this list for our homepage currently.

Please if you have more questions regarding the font stuff or imagesets make a new thread in the beginners forum and don't extend this thread with such information, it makes it disorganised and more difficult to look up for other users.