Game Guru is hard coded to reference certain font sizes for certain things. I changed the colour of the font sprite sheets to see what they do:
Text Size 1 - 12px - Editor Text
Text Size 2 - 24px - Test game loading screen
Text Size 3 - 25px - not sure (possibly multiplayer?)
Text Size 4 - 36px - Prompts, Health max, Ammo remaining
Text Size 5 - 40px - Health current and ammo current
Text Size 6 - 72px - Lives
Text Size 7 - 128px - ??
So every time you put "Prompt" in a LUA script, Game Guru is hard-wired to look for the 36px font file. The "Text" command gives you a little more control.
Here's a mini-tutorial on how to change your fonts:
1) Make a folder containing your original fonts within the fontbank folder. I called my folder "original".
2) Download
BMFont
Once in BMFont...
3) Go to Options -> Font Settings. Here you can change your font, and change the size. Refer to my list above for what sizes to use, so if you want text that is the same size as your existing prompts but in a different font, use 36px.
4) In Options -> Export Options you can play around with the padding, spacing and (most importantly) texture size.
5) Options -> Visualize allows you to see a preview of your sprite sheet. Go back and forth between this and Export Options to tweak your texture size so there isn't too much empty space. I once exported a sprite sheet at 608 x 608...although it's not a typical texture size, it worked fine and was an efficient use of space.
6) Export Options also give you options for file format and whether or not to export an alpha channel (which you almost certainly will want). I've never had much success exporting with an alpha channel from BMfont so I tend to have to edit the sprite sheet afterwards and add in my own one. This will obviously require an art package like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or Gimp etc.
7) Make sure your Font Descriptor is set to Text.
8) When you're happy, go to Options -> Save bitmap font as... and save the font into Game Guru's fontbank folder. The name doesn't matter too much at this stage but be aware that you will be replacing an existing sprite sheet so you can only have a maximum of 7 fonts/font sizes.
9) BMFont will create 2 files, a sprite sheet in whatever format you specified, and a .fnt font descriptor which is a basically just a text file. Rename the sprite sheet to overwrite an existing font, for example "FPSCR-Font-36px.png". Rename your text descriptor to "FPSCR-Font-36px-Subimages.fnt".
10) Open your .fnt file in notepad. There's a lot of useless data here that needs to be deleted as Game Guru is only interested in the numbers. The quickest way to do this is to do Ctrl+H (or Edit -> Replace).
- Delete the first few lines up to and including "chars count=185" (or however many chars you have!)
- Replace "char id=" with nothing (leave it blank)
- Replace "x=" with a colon ":"
- Replace "y=" with a colon ":"
- Replace "width=" with a colon ":"
- Replace "height=" with a colon ":"
11) All of the rest of the data in each line from "xoffset=" onwards is now superfluous. Delete everything from "xoffset=" to "chnl=15". You can use replace to get rid of the words (by replacing with a blank) but the numbers will need to be done by hand. That will take a while depending on how many characters you have. Sorry!
12) Your font descriptor should now basically be 5 columns of numbers that read something like this "32 :36 :276 :8 :45". Note; the spacing between the numbers and the colons doesn't seem to matter, "32:36" will return the same result as "32 :36". Save.
Your font should now work in Game Guru. To test this out, either write a script that calls text of the size you just replaced, or use DVader's script above to test out your new font.
Hope that helps!
AE
