Bold fonts in GCU mode... opinions?

[d_m]

So someone playing Unangband (which is now using main-gcu.c from V) noticed that all the text was being bolded, and commented that it made things look really ugly for him. I checked and sure enough all the text in 256 color mode is bolded.

It looks a lot better for me (in gnome-terminal and xterm) when those fonts are bolded. Also, it's worth noting that in 16 color mode (ANSI) 8 of the colors are bold and 8 aren't (and this can't be changed). I think I chose to bold all the colors because it seemed closer to the way things look in 16 color mode.

What are people's thoughts? I assume no one has noticed so far, or thought it was particularly bad. To see what it looks like unbolded, edit line 652 of main-gcu.c changing:

colortable[i] = COLOR_PAIR(i + 1) | A_BRIGHT;

to:

colortable[i] = COLOR_PAIR(i + 1);

Finally this could be a command-line option (or an environment variable), although I'm not excited about either of those.

Thoughts?

[Magnate]

Is it possible to mix bold and non-bold colours in our new "256"-colour main-gcu? I would much rather see a mixture if possible. Could we add ATTR_BOLD as a flag in monster.txt, for example?Or could we define 52 colours instead of 26, with a bold and non-bold for each? That would be good too.

[d_m]

Is it possible to mix bold and non-bold colours in our new "256"-colour main-gcu? I would much rather see a mixture if possible. Could we add ATTR_BOLD as a flag in monster.txt, for example?Or could we define 52 colours instead of 26, with a bold and non-bold for each? That would be good too.

It would be possible, although like I said only 256-color GCU mode would be able to handle it... ANSI colors would still be bold or unbold depending on which seemed closest.

Presumably all the other ports could easily mix bold and non-bold characters.

[Magnate]

It would be possible, although like I said only 256-color GCU mode would be able to handle it... ANSI colors would still be bold or unbold depending on which seemed closest.

Presumably all the other ports could easily mix bold and non-bold characters.

I expect so. Do we need to continue to support ANSI? If people playing in a terminal can now get 256-colours, perhaps not? If we went the second route and defined two sets of colours (one bold, one non-bold), we could always take care to ensure that they were only used to distinguish between similar items (e.g. light and heavy xbow, lesser and greater basilisk, balrog etc.) - this way if anyone did play with ANSI limitations the colour changes would not be fatal.