display-related questions
 

Hi there

I recently started playing Angband on a Windows machine, and I have a few questions that I couldn't find answers to after searching.

1. How do I use a font other than the ones shipped with the game? Do I have to make a tileset? Do other Windows .fon files work? Do they have to be loaded in an ini file?

2. What is "bizarre display"? It doesn't seem to have any effect and isn't mentioned in any documentation or web search that I found.

Thanks!

Okay, I guess bizarre display is supposed to fix problems related to Windows Vista. But I'm still in the dark about how to create a font or tileset for Angband. Preferably just a font.

Much much older. I found a Zangband thread from 2001 mentioning it (regarding a problem on a windows 2000 machine with bizarre display off):

The only effect of switching the "bizzare display" option on is that a line of text isn't drawn in one go, but rather letter by letter. So the ASCII mode is a tiny bit slower with the option turned on.

i too am curious if there's an optional font or list of fonts the game may use?

I don’t use the windows UI, but with the SDL2 UI, you just put the font files in lib/fonts next to the other font files. The documentation for the windows library function the code calls says it handles TTF, OTF, etc as well as FON, so it’s worth a shot to try the same thing in windows.

I keep seeing mention of this SDL 2 UI, but in the game itself, I see no evidence of a new UI. How do I access it?

Start the game with the command line "angband -msdl2". (Assuming SDL2 support was compiled in, which requires some extra steps if you are compiling the game yourself, but I assume it's already included in the standard builds.)

I got "Cannot find required file: -msdl2"

For use on Linux, you can congure to use SDL2 (with --enable-sdl2), and then run with -msdl2.

It is probably (possibly?) possible to build for windows using sdl2, but it would at least take more work.