AutoBFont

AutoBFont is small tool for text rendering on OpenGL(and can be easily ported to DX) with bitmap fonts, providing a way to draw perfectly aligned text with bitmap sheets created in Fireworks/Photoshop/Gimp and Inkscape. The tool is composed by two parts : an generator and a loader class.

The monospace font with and without a drop shadow(effect created in Inkscape) rendered with the help of autobfont

The generator computes each character limits from the character sheet bitmap, which should be a RGBA TGA image with no compression. It should have 16 columns by 16 rows to fill with characters and the size of the image should be power of 2 (1024x1024 for example). If only the first 8 rows are used, the remaining rows can be used to fit a "bold" version of the font.

The generator program requires 3 mandatory arguments :

-i CHARACTER_CONVERSION_MAP.TXT 

-m CHARACTER_BITMAP_SHEET.TGA

-o OUTPUT_MAP.TXT

Optional arguments :

-b Compute the Bold characters in the last 8 rows.

-h VALUE  Set all characters line height (the default value is 3*CELL_SIZE/4).

-t VALUE Set alpha threshold value, improves character boundaries detection (default value is 50, max is 255).

The conversion map is a text file with the ASCII character for each cell in the bitmap sheet, although it's limited to Latin characters, the generator and loader can be changed to use wchar_t structure instead of char for other languages such as japanese. All the characters in the bitmap font should by white (if you want to use color blending in OGL, but isn't mandatory) with a background transparent (below the alpha threshold value).

The loader class is available in the demo.cpp class, which loads the generated output map and the renders the characters with OpenGL.

To convert the SVG to TGA use gimp with no RLE compression and  bottom left origin.

The typical commands to compile and run the generator and demo on linux:

make

./generator -i ct_PT.txt -m font_ubuntu.tga -o font_ubuntu_map.txt

./demo font_ubuntu_map.txt font_ubuntu.tga

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Logotype

Ok, a little explanation about the logo I finished recently.

For me the demoscene "thing" started around the year 1992 before i even understood what the heck "demoscene" meant or had any skills to do anything with computers beyond playing games. Back then my sister had received her first computer, a 486DX with 4MB of RAM. After some months she got some games from her friends and some of them included some cracktro apps, which back then where a confusing concept for me, since they had no propose beyond showing the artwork and moving letters plus some audio.

NapalmCore logo created with Blender 2.56

The first cracktro i saw was the TEKNO SKULL by TDT / TRSi, which impressed me since I was a little kid and had a particular fear of skeletons. In the course of the time, with the influence of the cyberpunk culture in animes and movies from the 80's & 90's, the fear was lost and this goreish characteristic remained as a symbol from those years and the culture it self.

The logotype creation started back then at the Euskal 2008 for the 3D competition, at the time it only featured the skull. Recently i decided to recycle the model, remaking the skull with better detail and adding the extra details, such as the mechanical stuff and the sun glasses. I also was inspired by latest razor 1911 prods which have an unique new-old-school style, mimicking the 90's hardware with the latest graphics effects, for example, the grid pattern effect can be seen on the "StarCraft 2 cracktro" or the "Pirates of the 777 seas". The sunglasses are due to the influences of Motoko Kusanagi from the ghost in the shell :)

With this, i can finally conclude by saying that the name of this blog/website/demoscene group reflects the unique cyberpunk culture from the last years of the 20 century, plus the cracking culture which evolved to the demoscene which we have currently.