You can use your own font picture for 20XX.



This is the original MS Gothic font that normally comes with RPG Maker 2003. The font picture is in 32-bit alpha (not this one, the one with 20XX). When you select a color to draw in, the color is actually one of twenty automatically generated images which are copies of this font multiplied with the color pattern:



I can't think of a way to do this in real time with your video card that will work on all of your machines. This is the safest way and is also compatible with graphic libraries which don't support blending. It's also the fastest way in runtime even though changing the system graphic will take slightly longer than before.

Anyway, since the purple parts are all alpha=0, they don't show up even though there's this blue shutterblind pattern over it because anything times 0 is 0.

Outlines and more

Because of this, you have dimensions more control over how your fonts are drawn on screen. If you want fonts to have that lovely 1-pixel outline (just like in WeaponBirth or the debugger font shown in the screenshots here), draw the black pixels around the letters and make sure the alpha for them is 100%. Black multiplied by anything is black, and its alpha is 1 so it shows up as black in the game. The result is both outline and with the typical letter gradient applied.

You could even have colors in this font picture- who knows what text effects you can draw. Your font will also appear the same on all the end machines.

So why didn't the original game do this?

The drawback to this and the reason why the original RPG_RT.exe used a system font is that you can't have all the kanji and symbols in Japanese. I would have to use these system fonts (which exist on Japanese Windows Machines by the way) to draw white on transparent glyphs. The text must be rasterized onto an image and then loaded into your video card. This image would get swapped out when the text is no longer needed.

Supporting Japanese

Support for Japanese text is kind of important. I'm sure there's many people on that tiny island who would love to use this engine in their projects, and conversely, people here who want to play Japanese games with 20XX. Therefore, at some point I must implement this.

It won't be too hard, I could just use Windows to draw text onto an HBITMAP. Then, lock the bitmap and copy the pixels into one of my images. Then, multiplying it with a system graphic pattern will be easy just as above. Finally, it is moved into the video card. Text that is not used is moved off of the video card. Ironically, this method will be slower for changing texts, dialog boxes and menus, but use much less memory than the typical ASCII (ASCII as in the code for letters shown above, not the Japanese company ASCII) map.