My Font arbitrarily changed itself!!! Anyone have a good eye for fonts?

[swerdmurd]

I am rather baffled. I saved my game last night, went to bed. Opened this morning - and my font for all my strings changed. No clue what it was before - and after testing a good 50 odd fonts, I cannot figure out what it was originally set at.

I must've accidently changed something... but I have no clue how I changed it in 3 different places - one on a different frame - to the same, wrong font, and didn't realize it. I do have a screenshot of a test screen in an older save before my font up and left on me.

993391_1415106175370585_2145368100_n.png

Does anyone have a good enough eye to know what the font is on the Sword / Armor names? I manually checked every font in my list on the text window and none of them looked like this.

And has anyone ever encountered something like this? It's quite bizarre. I can't see how it could happen on its own, yet I have no idea what sort of accidental coordinated effort I would've had to pull off to do this to myself.

[happygreenfrog]

I am rather baffled. I saved my game last night, went to bed. Opened this morning - and my font for all my strings changed. No clue what it was before - and after testing a good 50 odd fonts, I cannot figure out what it was originally set at.

I must've accidently changed something... but I have no clue how I changed it in 3 different places - one on a different frame - to the same, wrong font, and didn't realize it. I do have a screenshot of a test screen in an older save before my font up and left on me.

993391_1415106175370585_2145368100_n.png

Does anyone have a good enough eye to know what the font is on the Sword / Armor names? I manually checked every font in my list on the text window and none of them looked like this.

And has anyone ever encountered something like this? It's quite bizarre. I can't see how it could happen on its own, yet I have no idea what sort of accidental coordinated effort I would've had to pull off to do this to myself.

It could be that the font file somehow got deleted, though I don't know what would cause that.

[swerdmurd]

Yeah that's my confusion... All the possible explanations involve pretty deliberate manual effort.

Well... off to search for... not sure what exactly. Maybe there's an 8-pixel-wide fixed-width font compendium somewhere? /shrug

[MuddyMole]

The font is just a variant of the standard "Fixedsys" (IBM code page 437) font used in old versions of DOS.
The precise version you used is actually quite hard to track down (most versions you find online are subtly different). When I needed it for my clone of the CGA classic "Sopwith", I ended up having to recreate it for myself using FontStruct - and funnily enough, it looks like someone else has done the exact same thing!
http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/87372

[swerdmurd]

NICE!

See I knew something was up... Fixedsys looked close, but was slightly too large and the line spacing was larger, so it still wrecked my formatting something awful. Huge thanks for figuring that out - I couldn't figure out what to google. You just made the special thanks page.

I wish I could pretend there was some prestige in that honor... But still - hearty golf clap for you my good man. It did teach me one thing though - it's clearly not a normal windows font - and if I want an exe only (no installer), I should pick from that library exclusively. I still wish I could figure out how I had it, and where it went so suddenly...

I think I'm gonna remake it as well (or snag that one) and just blit it in from now on, like I do w/ my 8x8, so it won't be an issue. I would've set up a text blitting part of this game, but it's gamejam style and I didn't wanna expend the time.

[swerdmurd]

All right... some updates on this little problem.

It turns out the font was indeed Terminal - but that Terminal apparently has 2 distinct, VERY different versions. More frustrating is the fact that every single time I restart my computer, it appears to switch these versions out completely at random. I've now had my font change back into the proper font twice, and back to the incorrect font 3 times (and is currently incorrect).

I copied Terminal out of my Fonts directory during one of the "looks good" phases - but I'm unable to copy it back into Fonts (now that it's busted) and revert it to good-font status.

This is quite literally the most frustrating thing I've ever experienced. I have absolutely no control over when or why this will happen, there's no information of any sort on arbitrary flip-flopping of fonts.... Does anyone actually use fonts in mmf, or does everyone just blit them in? Cause I can't possibly be the first person this has ever happened to 5 different times....

Windows 8 if that matters.

What do people do to figure out problems like this? I swear I've never understood where to even start to look in a case like this. There's nothing to google that makes any sense / seems like it would get me anywhere - even something as simple as Terminal font doesn't result in anything about the actual Terminal font.

[AyreGuitar]

swerdmurd - not sure what's happening to your PC, but I tried searching:
"windows 8" "terminal font" keeps changing

And found this that might help:
http://superuser.com/questions/58898...ion-changed-it

Hope it helps!
Of course it might be some kind of fairly harmless virus that keeps changing it (or more likely some program you keep using)?

[swerdmurd]

That's an interesting point AG! Didn't think about another program modifying the font.

I assumed this type of overwriting could only occur on an installation, but that assumption isn't really founded in anything. I'm gonna play around with running random apps / restarting, and see if I can stumble onto something.

And while I did try what that link recommended, it got me thinking differently. Thanks! Ultimately, this will inspire me to build my own event-driven blitter with more functionality - and to FontStruct several non-aliased, pixel-style fonts I can bundle with an install - but man if these issues aren't the most abrupt progress-stoppers on earth!