Hi all,

as already mentioned in the text for my IRTC:Music-entry, those pigs I'm
mostly working with at the moment have been primarily made for
demonstrating a few ideas for a computer game. This game, which will
probably never be finished, is heavily based on Settlers by BlueByte. We,
that is, my wife and me, had a few wishes concerning Settlers since version
1 - which we played on the amiga - long time ago! We had a few ideas
concerning a more complicated ecology, and other people had those, too,
obviously, since some of them are in Settlers 3 and 4. Alas, BlueByte has
given up the Macintosh after Settlers version 2 (and we WON'T buy a windows
box, not even for that game:-)), and so we continue dreaming about our own
settlers clone, which is called "Pig Island" for the time being. Though the
little guys in BlueByte's game now need houses to multiply, they obviously
use some kind of low-tech cloning, since the only girls seen onscreen are
the amazons (and that society is female only :-) ). We always wanted guys
and gals, so without further ado please look at two pictures showing the
special clothing for (most of) the occupations pigs can have, male and
female. The legend is in german, I have to say, and RealLife(TM) prevents
me from translating all that. I would have to get a better dictionary
first, since I really don't know the english names for some of those old
crafts ...

Comments welcome

Karl

----
Settlers, BlueByte, and Windows are, of course, Registered Trademarks of
companies you all know; no copyright infringement was intended ...

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Attachments:
Download 'piggirls.jpg' (248 KB)

Preview of image 'piggirls.jpg'

.... and here the boys ...

Comments welcome, as before

Karl

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Attachments:
Download 'pigboys.jpg' (246 KB)

Preview of image 'pigboys.jpg'

It reminds me of a set of test characters that I created back in the
days of POV v2.

http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/temp/railwaymen.jpg

One of them ended up working on the railway in "Little Willy Wiggins
Misses His Train".

http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/pictures/plat.jpg

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:47:47 -0400 Karl Anders wrote:

> .... and here the boys ...
> 
> Comments welcome, as before
> 
> Karl

I liked Settlers very much and I think it was Settlers 2 I played
some years ago. So I like the idea :-).

Btw. PoV-Ray supports Unicode in utf8 encoding.
Though there were problems with some PoV-Fonts and
umlauts iIrc. I just saw 'Holzfaeller'...

Sebastian

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Mike Williams <nos### [at] econymdemoncouk> wrote:
> It reminds me of a set of test characters that I created back in the
> days of POV v2.
>
> http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/temp/railwaymen.jpg
>
CUTE ! Really !

> One of them ended up working on the railway in "Little Willy Wiggins
> Misses His Train".
>
> http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/pictures/plat.jpg
>

Interesting, I have also been thinking about making a scene with toy
trains...

But that has yet to come, I still have a few older ones to post, and my
little daughter (5.5 years old) won't let me work on something new at the
moment.

Greetings

Karl

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"Sebastian" <van### [at] gmxde> wrote:
>
> I liked Settlers very much and I think it was Settlers 2 I played
> some years ago. So I like the idea :-).
>

Thank you, but, as I've written before, it will be a loooong time before
this game will really exist, if ever. Nevertheless we feel quite good
dreaming about professions for the pigs and other details.

> Btw. PoV-Ray supports Unicode in utf8 encoding.

That I had already found in the docs ...

> Though there were problems with some PoV-Fonts and
> umlauts iIrc. I just saw 'Holzfaeller'...
>

.... and found it easier to make japanese characters with osaka.ttf (part of
system 9) then to write umlauts with the PoV-Fonts. If Thorsten ever sees
this he will probably tell me it's dead easy, but I wanted to put my little
bit of spare time into the piggies and not into the writing. When I started
using computers there were no umlauts at all (those were the days), so
"Holzfaeller" does not look too strange to me :-)

Greetings
Karl

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On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:27:02 -0400 Karl Anders wrote:


> .... and found it easier to make japanese characters with osaka.ttf (part of
> system 9) then to write umlauts with the PoV-Fonts. If Thorsten ever sees
> this he will probably tell me it's dead easy, but I wanted to put my little
> bit of spare time into the piggies and not into the writing.

Yes, of course.
 
> When I
> started using computers there were no umlauts at all (those were the
> days), so "Holzfaeller" does not look too strange to me :-)

It's not too strage for me, too, but it's not as nice as it can be.

There's a character set named 'unicode' as an extension to 'ascii'.
It contains a lot characters. Most symbols of known languages and of
some unknown as well are represented. Unfortunaltely 7 or 8 bits are not
enough to enumerate all those characters therefore some sort of multibyte
encoding is required. One of this is utf8. Within the first (last?) 7 bits
'utf8' is identical to 'ascii' so theres no need to change anything
('ascii' encoded text is also 'utf8' encoded). But additionaly it has the
capability to interpret 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes as one character.

Most modern text editors support utf8 encoding they just have to be
told to use it (Actually my whole OS/Linux system uses utf8 as standard
encoding but thats an other story).

To use utf8 in PoV you just must add 'charset utf8' into the global
settings, like this

global_settings {
	charset utf8
}

and of course switch your editor to utf8-encoding.

This won't influence any 'ascii'-scenes but additionally you can use
umlauts, japanese and chinese characters and a lot other characters all at
once directly from within the text editor. 
Unfortunately some PoV-ttf-Fonts do not contain german umlaut characters,
so one has to chose another ttf-file for these.

Maybe this is of interest for you.

Regards,
Sebastian

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"Sebastian" <van### [at] gmxde> wrote:

Hi Sebastian,

thanks for your thorough explanation, though I have to hint at the fact that
I knew most of  that before (I did mention osaka.ttf and rendering
japanese/chinese characters ?!) :-)

The main problem is hidden in your phrase
>
> and of course switch your editor to utf8-encoding.
>
to which I reply "which SWITCH ??"     ;-)

I'm using a Mac, system 9.0, and neither POV-Ray's nor MegaPOV's inbuilt
editor supports utf8 directly, nor any other I have here. I have got my
very personal reasons for NOT updating to OS X, which I would prefer not to
discuss here. I've had enough of that when Thorsten (rightfully!!) asked me
to switch to a system less than fifteen years old when I reported some
minor problems with POV-Ray ... :-)

Anyway, if I needed to have umlauts in my picture, I could always enter the
code directly into the string, I have used that before but didn't care to
do so with this overview.

Thank you for your patience and your explanations

Karl

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Karl Anders wrote:
> .... and here the boys ...
> 
> Comments welcome, as before
> 
> Karl
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 

They look good, much better than I could dream up.

Anyhow, one thing stuck out at me.

What do you plug into their noses?
They look a electrical outlet ;-)


LAter... Tom

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Dear Karl,

    There exists an opensource project called widelands that tries to make
an improved version of good old settlers 2: http://www.widelands.org
    I would like myself too to see a 3D version of the old settlers come to
life someday. For that purpose I have left tonight a post on their forum
explaining what skills and ideas I have to offer. Would you be so kind and
check this post, maybe by joining our efforts we could together with the
widelands team make a 21st century settlers game?

Post:
http://xoops.widelands.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=8&forum=6

Best Regards
Mohican

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