Andrew Glassner's Notebook: Recreational Computer Graphics is a really neat book (I especially like the tiles that can add numbers). The author's site is https://glassner.com/computer-graphics/
He then goes on to the 66 segment Vienna underground font and an 83 segment font he saw in an elevator at a Siggraph conference in Orlando ... and then concludes with his own 55 element mosaic.
At 7:00 into the video is C & D pages looking at the modularity of a font.
(the section "U & V" about 3/4 down the page has the modular components for Kombinations-Schrift https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2724 which was also looked at at 22:00 into the video.
The six segment one... if you get going with it, it's not too difficult to read. There are some odd ones there, but it's surprisingly readable (some are easier than some of the seven segment letterforms).
Many of these seem to be on HN if you come to think about it as every post about fonts skyrockets immediately in popularity. Or STEM people are generally inclined to adoration of nice looking glyphs...
Yes! I've always been interested in seeing what arcana and niches (like fonts) fairly predictably rise to the top here, kind of a Bizarro World third rail (not including AI and cryptocurrency, which seem to have/had their own subworlds).
In no particular order, after nearly 10 years of paying attention (the past five or so multiple times daily):
I'd like to see Apple pull a Jaguar with their marketing department. Might clean the sewer enough to get them toward a that sweet middle ground of "users like us" and "shareholder profits."
The Sims will forever be one of those magic games to me; one that inspired me to learn MAX to get my own items into the game, non-perspective rendering, sprites, z-buffer, iirc. I still play and work in 3D to this day, game modding has taught me the best way to interact with a computer... create vs. consume!
It has this quality that I'd describe as toy-like, you can pick it up in so many different ways and let your imagination fill in the experience.
Personally I'd spend weeks just building, paused, filling up my account §§§ as I need, ignoring my sims at the curb. Other times I'd give it an honest play-through roleplaying as myself in a different world. Eventually I'd be mean and lock my Sims in a- (maybe I'll not document my war-crimes today.)
I'd reinstall and build up a fancy house, but I fear it'd grab me like a Factorio drip and I'd disappear into the Sims for a month. I think I'll give this a read instead, I haven't done the design-document thing since I studied Game Design in college many moons ago.
Thanks so much for posting all the tidbits and insight into another true gem of a game.
The software has evolved significantly since 2022, I'd even say that the dev has been flexible and enabled functionality to bridge some more traditional CAD use cases in modern versions. For example when you sketch shapes on a workplane you are able to define the measurement aspects, diameters, offsets, lengths; you can even quickly define relative angles when drawing out segmented lines.
However there are no parametric controls for the elements of your shapes or drawings. Keeping these constraints out of mind certainly helps me get into a flow when modeling, much more akin to subd or poly modeling while maintaining the benefits of NURBS. But for adapting models quickly for more flexible designs isn't /really/ the tool for it. You can take it pretty far though!
I personally use Plasticity to model all kinds of things including 3d-printed items (vacuum wall mounting, iPhone lens mount, storage cases, clips...) All of these items needed to be measured accurately and Plastiticy was able to handle that without issue.
I've been using 3d software for 20+ years, Max, Maya, Blender, XSI, Houdini, Wings3d, Lightwave, Modo, ZBrush, Mudbox... "lots" of 3d software. Some get the job done and some are even a pleasure to use, Plasticity decidedly in my mind does both.
Yeah, my understanding is that it's pretty universally Perforce in game dev. For them it's the large file versioning. I work at an ASIC firm and we similarly use Perforce; to some extent for the large file versioning, and to some extent for other general scale benefits.
I've only used SVN and Git and I'm almost 20 years into my career at this point so I know nothing of these others but my game dev friends all use Perforce. I couldn't tell you a single thing about it though.
As someone who spent a lot of time sorting, collecting, and selecting typefaces in a print shop, as soon as I saw the details in Berekeley Mono it was a similar experience. (Take my money) It's homey while having the appropriate modernity for legibility.
I prefer the version with ligatures disabled, but it's nice to see them available.
I already expect Neil will earn a purchase from me for Houston Mono when it's available. I have a terminal based "game" experience I've been toying with and waiting to use it for.
Second your Gruvbox comment, although I recently decided to take TokyoNight for a spin, I'll loop back eventually, probably!
Personally, I saw the ligatures and really didn't like them. The /= and ||= look monumentally ugly to me for C code, and makes the meaning less clear. The only ones that looked worthwhile were /* and */. The rest just seemed to be ligatures for the sake of it.
Berkeley Mono is my favourite! It's the crossed seven that matches my handwritten style which I really appreciate. Not very common in other monospace fonts I've tried.
I really enjoy this font for development and writing documentation. I carry it around for everything. Default monospace across the board: Terminal, IDE, Notes; sometimes I go buck-wild and monospace the entire Desktop-Environment to match.
I also write Z and z with a stroke. And then someone on Twitter suggested we should add it as an option. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it despite of writing it that way! It’s coming.
I saw this, and the comment below asking why there are different versions of e.g. 0 and 7. Saw the variant picker on your site, and I can't help but wonder:
Do you have any plans to add the different variants in as stylistic alternates (SALTn tables)? This is how FontFont encoded two styles of numbers and other various symbols into a single OpenType font. With FF Zwo I like some of the alternates but not others and this lets me choose.
They already are part of stylistic sets. So, for example, if you download a combination of 0 and 7 (regardless of which one), there are ss01-ss06 stylistic sets that encode other options in it.
The reason why we have a "font configurator" is because lot of terminals/IDEs/tools/OS, etc haven't got a full support for OpenType features. So we let users configure it as they like and it just works.
Oh that's good to know. Admittedly I didn't look too hard but I didn't see any indication that the salt tables were populated. Judging by the comments I may not be the only one.
I guess it’s also something cultural depending on where we live. I’m from France and here a lot of people cross 7 and Z, and write 1 with a bottom bar. When I went to Japan, I found that a lot of people were disturbed by those "European" variants.
This looks like the "scambaiter" actually scammed an artist into making some pretty sweet art under the guise of a scolarship. Am I missing something, or is this actual fraud?
>> I was also able to discover the name and contact details of John's artist and managed to contact him to confirm he had indeed been paid for his work, although he wouldn't tell me how much he was paid!
419 Eater was a place to show-off, coordinate, discuss tactics, etc. Topic: Scambaiting
I believe it's origins were going directly after the scammers behind an advance-fee scam, a.k.a. the "Nigerian prince scam". 419 is in reference to some criminal code.
Font specimen pages are so often screaming with design language and intention, they push and prod to evoke and present.
Maybe the secret has something to do with the lack of priority to the actual content; just present the font gosh-darn!
Looks nicely executed within the confines of the inspiration. very cool