C# Pihlaja engine

Started to write an engine in C# for a roguelike game. The engine was named 'Pihlaja' (it's a plant). So the way I approached it was a blank Form1 with a picture box control. It's a simple area that you can display a bitmap image. This bitmap image is then filled with ascii tiles which also are bitmaps. It's quite easy, because you can print font data on image as pixels and use that as faster way to draw ascii fonts. It seems to be quite fast even without any hardware acceleration (I guess it doesn't have it?).

There were some problems as always. First one was that I copy-pasted the Load method of Form1 which you don't want to do, because C# doesn't know it's there! You have to double-click the header of Form1 to generate a method. Even stranger if there is a manual Load method the new one is named Load_1, so it adds _1 in the name and that's the only working version. You can't rename it Load, in fact you can't remove the code that's generated by Visual Studio or the Form1 breaks! There is some kind of internal version of that code and whatever VS generates should not be deleted or renamed, or copy-pasted to another project.

The second issue was that when you get font metrics you can only get the height of the font in pixels even with monospace fonts. And it contains a lot of empty pixels around the font, but you can adjust the pixel rectangle size manually for that bitmap version. The font's 0,0 position is also quite far away from the edge, but you can print the font in negative location, in this case -1, -2 was the right location. I determined the font width from height, but it was width=height-9 so you can remove a lot of pixels from that. The font must be installed on computer I guess (dynamic resource), but I think you can also use font family (generic monospace).

Third problem is that AutoSize of Form1 doesn't work properly and this seems to be a common problem. It means you can't resize the form (or window) to match the size of the content (picture box in this case). There is randomly some kind of margin at the bottom and right sides of the window. Could try to give the picture box some top and left margins to see if it behaves better.

C# language experiences

I've programmed something with C#, a loader for .wst tiles to test how easy it could be. To be honest it was kind of easy. C# has a large library of stuff which makes trivial things let's say somewhat easier than in C++. C# in Windows at least is closely tied to Windows APIs (or whatever they are called these days) and programs with GUI has that part in them. I'm not too happy about working with Windows form designer etc. but that's life for you.

As a language C# is quite close to C++, but the main difference is automatic value/reference system similar to Visual Basic. Another easy to spot difference is that you write code directly to classes, there are no header files or declarations of classes. Namespaces are an essential part of programming as they should be. Other than that the syntax is very close to C++ which makes it a lot easier to approach than let's say Visual Basic.

After writing the loader I've started to think about trying to write a simple roguelike engine for C#. It's sad that I can't think of any other game types, but maybe roguelikes are the only games I want to play? In my opinion C# doesn't make everything that much easier, because the hardest part of a program is always the content and actions of the program. But it could make some GUI stuff easier to implement.

Font ligatures and Space Mono

Ligatures connect two letters to one unicode character to represent something "better". This is a new feature in programming which I feel is useless twiddling. Recently I tried a monospace font 'Space Mono' which actually is a great font for programming. But for some comical reasons it has a ligature with f and i letters, forming a 'fi'. It's not even that it has any "programming" ligatures, it seems to have just that one.

Visual Studio supports ligatures, but that's the problem, you can't turn it off. It's almost as if the designer of that font knew it and included 'fi' ligature as a joke. Strangely (or is it supposed to do that?) VS still takes fi as separate letters in data (compiling), but when displaying it breaks monospacing. You thought fonts were the last thing that humanity could possibly not fuck up, but they sure did it with ligatures.

I don't know if you can somehow turn ligatures off in VS, but that's not the point. It's just plain harassing using that 'fi' ligature in a monospace (programming) font. Even it was possible to turn it off the brief moment of joy finding a good font has passed. Let's get back to Consolas or something else and hope they don't ruin it as well.