Counter Tweaking

Ah Thursday, the day after National Day, and when I'm [still] on leave.

What a day.

First off, after ranting past stupid o'clock and crashing out shortly after, I found myself awake at 1000hrs later in the morning. Some time was spent catching up on the ESA Summer 2023 VODs, before I worked a little bit more on my 7×13 bitmap font.

``MT, didn't you say last time you were basically done?''

So I did, sort of. There was one last tweak that I was considering, and it involved how the counters were presented in characters like abdgpq. If you looked closely at the [corrected] character map from the previous post, you'll find that the counters of such characters can be roughly described as having parallel lines connected up with the vertical spans where they exist, as opposed to a more rounded feel the way one might normally print it out.

It's a minor shift of literally two pixels, but I think it was important, partly because of how Atkinson Hyperlegible shows how such rounded off counters do present a clearer profile that can be more strongly differentiated from the capital equivalents. I did the change, tested it out, and liked what I saw:

It's subtle, but it does look much nicer and less synthetic. I am thinking about doing something similar for the 5×10 font, but smaller horizontal extent used to define the counter made the application of the same pixel trick did not work as well, if at all. So no plans for that for now.

Apart from tweaking my 7×13 font yet again, I also got more runs in for Halls of Torment, unlocking even more characters, and having enough progression in the meta that my toons do not generally die easily any more.

I also made some progression in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with the in-game progression estimate hitting 90%.

Hmm... I think that's about it for now. I'll probably go do one more run of Halls of Torment, then turn in for the night---I've got places I need to be tomorrow, and I really don't want to run around half-cocked/asleep.

Till the next update then.