Shockbolt tiles

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I'd love to add the Shockbolt tiles to Sil, and am looking into it. Shockbolt has kindly offered to look into making the extra tiles I'd need, but first I want to check that it is possible to get it to work. I plan to borrow code from V to do this, so I thought I'd check out the tiles in a current version of V. However, this has left me puzzled.

I've just had my first hands-on experience with them by downloading the 3.4.0 RC version for Mac. This has a native UI menu with choice of graphics set and font face/size. However, the size of the tiles seems to be completely determined by the font size, which is measured in points. This leads to non-square tiles which are also rather arbitrary sizes, leading to rescaling of the original Shockbolt images. Strangely their aspect ratio skews towards wider and wider as I make the point size bigger.

When I try to enlarge/reduce the main window by dragging the bottom right corner, it doesn't add or subtract rows/columns, but scales the graphics. This allows me to produce roughly square tiles of roughly the right size, but I'd rather be able to have perfect squares at natural sizes (e.g. 32x32, 64x64, 96x96, 128x128). I'd also rather be able to have multiple characters of text per tile space. I seem to recall that it used to be much more like that. Is this still possible? Are there reasons for the change? Is this the same on the Windows/Linux ports?

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Looking around the forum, I found this screenshot, and this is basically how I'd like to use the tiles (with a couple of choices about how big to make them, and complete freedom about how big the window is in terms of rows/columns):

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=891&d=1325021636

[myshkin]

I've just had my first hands-on experience with them by downloading the 3.4.0 RC version for Mac. This has a native UI menu with choice of graphics set and font face/size. However, the size of the tiles seems to be completely determined by the font size, which is measured in points. This leads to non-square tiles which are also rather arbitrary sizes, leading to rescaling of the original Shockbolt images. Strangely their aspect ratio skews towards wider and wider as I make the point size bigger.

When I try to enlarge/reduce the main window by dragging the bottom right corner, it doesn't add or subtract rows/columns, but scales the graphics. This allows me to produce roughly square tiles of roughly the right size, but I'd rather be able to have perfect squares at natural sizes (e.g. 32x32, 64x64, 96x96, 128x128). I'd also rather be able to have multiple characters of text per tile space. I seem to recall that it used to be much more like that. Is this still possible? Are there reasons for the change? Is this the same on the Windows/Linux ports?

The Cocoa port is definitely idiosyncratic with respect to resizing and tile handling. The Windows and other ports have not changed similarly, as far as I know. I would like to get support for changing rows and columns back into the port. It is possible that the way I added support for per-terminal fonts and font size settings has broken tile sizing in some fashion.

I am less sure about multiple characters of text per tile space. Someone more familiar with the UI code than I may be able to comment on that.

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myshkin,

Firstly, thank you for all your work on the Mac port! I look forward to updating the Sil Mac port to reflect most of the changes when I can work out how...

I am less sure about multiple characters of text per tile space. Someone more familiar with the UI code than I may be able to comment on that.

If you look at the linked image above, it has 64x64 tiles and each character of text is much smaller than that. I think each character is a 6th of a tile wide and a 3rd of a tile tall. This seems like the best of both worlds to me. In previous versions with tiles, I thought that there was always too much black space between characters. I also now realise that one would rarely like the tiles to be much bigger than this (unless that is through super hi-res displays...) so my ideal sizes are probably 32x32, 48x48, 64x64.

If you are playing with tiles, then it seems that the Windows/Linux way is markedly superior to the current Mac way. Text only modes might reverse this though, so one needs to bear both in mind.

[myshkin]

myshkin,

Firstly, thank you for all your work on the Mac port! I look forward to updating the Sil Mac port to reflect most of the changes when I can work out how...

You're welcome! Still, the vast majority of the credit must go to ridiculousfish. I am mostly doing touchup here and there, and don't know near as much Objective C and Cocoa as would be ideal for this task... I'd be happy to lend a hand when you start on the Sil Mac work.

If you look at the linked image above, it has 64x64 tiles and each character of text is much smaller than that. I think each character is a 6th of a tile wide and a 3rd of a tile tall. This seems like the best of both worlds to me. In previous versions with tiles, I thought that there was always too much black space between characters. I also now realise that one would rarely like the tiles to be much bigger than this (unless that is through super hi-res displays...) so my ideal sizes are probably 32x32, 48x48, 64x64.

If you are playing with tiles, then it seems that the Windows/Linux way is markedly superior to the current Mac way. Text only modes might reverse this though, so one needs to bear both in mind.

Hmm. I see where the Windows port is playing with tile_wid/hgt in term_getsize(); is this the code you have in mind? I *think* that shouldn't be too hard to add to the Cocoa port, though likely not until 3.5.

It does also look as if the Carbon port's Graphics menu items for Nice graphics, Bigtile width, and Bigtile height do more or less what you describe (although the "Just get 'em square" option still leaves space between text characters)...so maybe I should just finish porting that behavior.