#PIXEN CHARACTER SIMULATOR#

Good thing I found GraphicsGale, which is nearly perfect. So, after a lot of fiddling around in Photoshop on my PC, and Pixen on my Mac, I realized that neither PS nor Pixen worked very well for what I was doing. I also appropriated some characters faces that I think make nice not-quite-standard dwarves from The Boukagne's Font, by PRS.

#PIXEN CHARACTER SIMULATOR#

The Microsoft Glass Gauge font from Flight Simulator was ok, but was composed of too many 45 degree angles for me to really like.Īfter a lengthy period of casting about for a fixed-pitch font that worked at the relatively high point size I wanted, I finally found Dimitar Zhekov's Terminus font, which looked almost right to me. I love Consolas, but it is totally not designed for non-Cleartype rendering. Regular OS or Photoshop-rendered grey-scale antialiasing just does not look good in Dwarf Fortress when the character cell background is inverted, since the characters have only a one-bit alpha mask. Or maybe it was one minute:įor line in file(creature_file).readlines(): I redefined the problem, tossed the parser, and spend two minutes putting another file scanner together. And I hadn't even gotten to the point of hooking up the parser output to generate creature objects that I would then be able to iterate through. Having used pyparsing successfully for a small project I did last year (implementing a simple custom script format for a game engine), I set about getting the rules together.Īfter four hours of fiddling with the fiddly bits, I had a parser capable of scanning through the creature_.txt files and. So I looked at the format and thought, 'I need a parser.'

Today, I decided to work on the idea a bit and see if I could come up with a quicker way to determine which tiles I need than scanning through the text files by hand. (Actually, I just counted and came up with 237, not all of which are displayable with object tiles - somewhat manageable since I won't be doing non-default states) There's quite a lot of creatures, though. I did a few experiments last week and decided it was worthwhile to create an object tileset for myself with creature names attached to the original character tile.įor example, a hippo would be an 'H' tile with the word 'hippo' in a very tiny font above it - a small thing, but I like the end result.

Pixen character