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Devlog #54 - The Market
The market has arrived!
On the sell tab you can list up to 10 items for sale.
On the buy tab you can search and sort all active market listings. That type filtering on the right is coming soon along with subtype filtering and level filtering. You can scroll through the pages by clicking the left and right arrow buttons, sort by price or time left by clicking on the headers, and reset by clicking on the red button at the top left.
I've had to write my own dropdown GUI container so the filtering code is taking a bit longer than I had anticipated. While I was writing the dropdown code I was trying to scale our FFF Harmony VX font and fell down a rabbit hole of pixel perfect font rendering for pixels fonts.
Some of the text in FO2 just doesn't look right to me. There is just something about the scaling and anti-aliasing that makes certain sizes like 12px and 14px not render as crisply as I would like it to. So that led me down the rabbit hole of re-learning about font file formats and how fonts are defined in those file formats. The most important property of a font, when it comes to scaling, is unitsPerEm. unitsPerEm is a measurement that defines the size of the em square, which is a virtual square that serves as a reference unit for designing and rendering fonts.
When the unitsPerEm value has divisors that do not divide evenly, it can lead to rounding errors. For instance, if your unitsPerEm is 1000 and you need to scale a glyph to a size where the scaling factor is not an integer, you might end up with fractional pixels, causing blurry or uneven rendering. Our main font is FFFHarmonyVX which when loaded into https://fontdrop.info/ shows that its unitsPerEm is 1024. That means that sizes of 8px and 16px will be rendered perfectly with this font. Unfortunately most of our text in FO2 is sized to 12px or 14px! Ah ha, this is why the text looks off and blurry!
After digging a bit deeper is seems these FFF fonts are from the now defunct http://www.fontsforflash.com/ . If you install the flash emulator https://ruffle.rs/, and then visit the site via the wayback machine you can see Fonts for Flash in all its mid-2000's glory. https://web.archive.org/web/20041229135145/http://www.fontsforflash.com/
And there it is, FFF Harmony, which is 8px. Let's try a later date and see if they have a 7px or 6px FFF Harmony available. And nope there aren't any. That old archive of the FFF website barely works. Time to go hunting for ways to scale pixel fonts nicely. Bitmap fonts are just no fun to work with!
Reaper was the big winner of Art Contest #3! Two more sets from this contest will be showing up in the coming weeks.
What should be the level limit to use the market?
We also made it through 2 1/2 iterations of the market. Once I figure out the font situation and add filtering I'm going to call it Market v1.0.
The reaper has been added to the game and a couple items have been retired until 2026.
The market search api endpoint quickly outpaced all other endpoints for execution time. There have been over 400,000 searches in the first week of the market being available. I'm guessing we'll pass the Vercel edge execution limit of 10 million in this current billing cycle. Thankfully extra executions are very very cheap.
On the music and sound effect front I've been hitting dead end after dead end. I've negotiated with 3 composers so far. The first quoted me a fee of $100K USD so uh yeah that's not possible, the second was not able to commit to a timeline of finishing the assets, and the third just didn't have enough experience. I'll be making finding a composer my top priority in July as we need it badly and I won't launch on any other platforms until we have these assets. DM me if you're a pro game music composer!
In the upcoming 2 week sprint I will be getting the market to v1.0, solving the font problem, and finally getting parties in-game. Perseus is hard at work on a Summer event, CoD quests, and FW mobs & drops. Dino is nearly done with The Forgotten Underground remake.
Tomorrow I will be making a post that will review our last roadmap from 6 months ago and present a new roadmap for the next 6 months. We made a ton of progress these last 6 months but there's still a lot of work still to be done.
See you for the new roadmap!
Have Fun & Keep Gaming!