Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!hpda!hpcuhb!hpcllla!hpclisp!hpcltjb!brengle
From: brengle@hpcltjb.HP.COM (Tim Brengle)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.games.bugs
Subject: Re: Using Xfonts for rogue
Message-ID: <8430001@hpcltjb.HP.COM>
Date: 22 Jul 88 18:41:38 GMT
References: <5492@super.upenn.edu>
Organization: HP NSG/ISD Computer Language Lab
Lines: 44

Well....

About 2 years ago I managed to make the stuff work right almost all of the time
and hacked on the fonts extensively.

Please forgive me that my recollections are vague.  It has been a while since I
looked at it.  After all, once it's fixed, why mess with it? :-)

The package of source that I received included sources to curses and to
termcap, both of which (as well as the actual game sources) needed *MINOR*
changes to work with the fonts.

In the curses stuff, I had to fix up the way that standout mode worked.  I seem
to remember that it was inappropriately striping off the 8th bit, which was
being used byt the standout routines.

In the termcap stuff, the fix was related to a non-font bug:  you could only
save the game some small number of times before restorals would croak.  It was
the result of some counter not being initialized to 0.

Most of the changes went into the game's code, but it wasn't all that bad.  It
took longer to hack the fonts!  There is a single routine that does almost all
the work of putting messages into the top line.  I think it was called
(strangely enough) msg.  I changed it so that it stopped standout mode, wrote
the message, and restarted standout mode.  You can probably tell that that
means that most of the characters were written in standout mode.  The other
major place that needed to be fixed (in exactly the same way) was the routine
which wrote the status line at the bottom of the screen.

There were a couple of other places that asked questions of the player that
needed the same change.  They were in the modules dealing with the each of the
types of objects.  I found them by playing and fixing them as I found them.

The most time consuming was the font editing.  The fonts were for version 5.3
and I hacked up a 7.0 version.  Lots of the monsters had changed.  *SIGH*  In
fact, I got so tired of it that there still are shome which are merely letters.

The game looks *REALLY* nice when you can use nice fonts...

I hope that this helps somewhat.

Tim Brengle				brengle@hplabs.hp.com
California Language Lab
Hewlett-Packard Company