Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Extend Rogue-like games with "graphics" (HELP :> )

I am a big fan of Diablo (and the first one is still the greatest for me!).

I recently downloaded and played Diablo Rogue-like: terrific!
Also because running the old Diablo on Windows7 is tricky, and I often get broken graphics or blue screen :( While the text-mode version DiabloRL works like a charm.
But I love the now "retro" Diablo graphics, so I was thinking about a way to fix a text-mode game with some graphics, and I remembered how things were done in ancient times with the C64 for example: one could redefine characters, and use them as graphics in a game!

And in windows you can in fact assign a different font to a console application, so imagine:
- grab the original Diablo graphics (legal issues a side for a sec)
- convert tiles and characters into elements of a font (i.e. characters),
- run DiabloRL with that font

Anybody ever tried something like this?

PS I found out that using Inkscape or GIMP it should be possible to "manually" create a font from some tiles. And there are some open/free resources to create fonts programmatically: here.

No comments:

Post a Comment