Tileset Question

[candidgamera]

I'm at my wit's end to answer this one, and I've come to you, my fellow adventurers, to try and figure this out. I've enjoyed many versions of Angband over the years, and found something to like in each of them - but one of them had my favorite tileset (or possibly font) of all time, and I am hoping I can find it again and apply it to current games.

It almost certainly is from a DOS or Windows vanilla version of Angband, pre-3.0. I know I played 2.7.9, but even though I scraped up an archival copy of it, I can't really get it to run on a modern PC, so I wasn't able to really check to see if it had what I was looking for.

The font or tileset looked like ASCII. Except there were special characters added in the character set - rings looked like a circle with a little stud on top. Basically, an ASCII-style ring. Armor objects looked like grey or brown t-shirt, as if there were an ASCII 'shirt' character. Monsters still looked like letters, it was mostly gear that had specialized icons.

Does this ring a bell for anyone else, and is there any hope I can find this to use in current versions of Angband? (Or Zangband 2.4, which I recently rediscovered..)

[Bill Peterson]

Even if you can't get that early Angband to run, the tile image file should be in the lib subdirectory.

[candidgamera]

Even if you can't get that early Angband to run, the tile image file should be in the lib subdirectory.

Early DOS versions don't seem to have a separate graphics file, and every version I can find with a bitmap 'tileset' does not have the correct one. I'm hoping people here can tell me which version it was, and whether it was a font or a tileset..

[candidgamera]

And if the customization was in the font - then I have to play the game to see it, because Windows' font preview only shows me the standard range of characters, not the oddballs that would have become rings and armor..

[candidgamera]

More fuzzy memories coming through - I believe it had special wall tiles. Instead of mineable gems appearing as an orange asterisk, they appeared as orange quartz walls, with a dollar sign superimposed.

[Sideways]

I think rephial's DOS version of 2.7.9v6 has what you're looking for, download that (from here) and run with "angband -g". It seems to be a special font.

[candidgamera]

I think rephial's DOS version of 2.7.9v6 has what you're looking for, download that (from here) and run with "angband -g". It seems to be a special font.

I will check it out, thank you! I hope I can get it to run.

[candidgamera]

Had to snag DOSBox, but dammit, you found it! .. unfortunately, I very much doubt there's a good way to grab this font for use in more modern incarnations of the game.

[candidgamera]

Well, the font file isn't buried in the executable, I don't think - at least, there is a pair of font files under XTRA, but despite being .FNT files, they don't seem to be standard .FNTs, as an online font converter program would not convert them.

Are you aware of any modern fonts or tilesets that are similar?

[luneya]

Given that you have found the font you are looking for in the old DOS version, you could try taking screenshots of the DOS font and importing them into something like FontForge. It's a lot more work than the font converter, but probably easier than scouring the internet for something similar, and it should get you exactly what you want.

[candidgamera]

Given that you have found the font you are looking for in the old DOS version, you could try taking screenshots of the DOS font and importing them into something like FontForge. It's a lot more work than the font converter, but probably easier than scouring the internet for something similar, and it should get you exactly what you want.

I am considering that as my ultimate fallback option. Thanks for the link!

[backwardsEric]

From the Angband 2.9.6 code in main-ibm.c, ANGBAND.FNT has 8x16 bitmaps for 256 characters without any extra metadata. That's loaded and sent to the VGA adapter. I didn't see where MONSTERS.FNT was used in the source code, despite it being present in LIB/XTRA.

This GitHub repository has a conversion of ANGBAND.FNT to a .fon file and a related preference file for Angband 4.2 to try to map objects and terrain to how they were mapped with LIB/XTRA/GREDIT.INI in Angband 2.9.6. I tried it briefly with the Linux SDL frontend but not with the Windows frontend. Other frontends for 4.2 (curses, X11, Mac OS X) don't use lib/fonts so that repository won't help to get that font from 2.9.6 to work with those frontends .

[candidgamera]

From the Angband 2.9.6 code in main-ibm.c, ANGBAND.FNT has 8x16 bitmaps for 256 characters without any extra metadata. That's loaded and sent to the VGA adapter. I didn't see where MONSTERS.FNT was used in the source code, despite it being present in LIB/XTRA.

This GitHub repository has a conversion of ANGBAND.FNT to a .fon file and a related preference file for Angband 4.2 to try to map objects and terrain to how they were mapped with LIB/XTRA/GREDIT.INI in Angband 2.9.6. I tried it briefly with the Linux SDL frontend but not with the Windows frontend. Other frontends for 4.2 (curses, X11, Mac OS X) don't use lib/fonts so that repository won't help to get that font from 2.9.6 to work with those frontends .

Damn, dude. Thank you! I will give it a shot.

[Pete Mack]

tangar made a possible font for tomenet, too.

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showpost.php?p=130250&postcount=156

[candidgamera]

From the Angband 2.9.6 code in main-ibm.c, ANGBAND.FNT has 8x16 bitmaps for 256 characters without any extra metadata. That's loaded and sent to the VGA adapter. I didn't see where MONSTERS.FNT was used in the source code, despite it being present in LIB/XTRA.

This GitHub repository has a conversion of ANGBAND.FNT to a .fon file and a related preference file for Angband 4.2 to try to map objects and terrain to how they were mapped with LIB/XTRA/GREDIT.INI in Angband 2.9.6. I tried it briefly with the Linux SDL frontend but not with the Windows frontend. Other frontends for 4.2 (curses, X11, Mac OS X) don't use lib/fonts so that repository won't help to get that font from 2.9.6 to work with those frontends .

No dice, sadly. It doesn't seem to load the font successfully in Windows. The PRF file loads and changes a bunch of things to different settings, but even when I tell the Term-0 window to explicitly load the Retro font, the visuals do not load.