XPText - A Text Renderer for the ASCII art tool REXPaint

[gamepopper]

Hello there! Thought I'd finally make my forum debut by showing this neat little project I just uploaded.

REXPaint is an ASCII art tool developed by GridSageGames, as the summary implies, it allows you to produce artwork using text, a particular art form found in roguelike games.

REXReader++ is a lightweight file reader class that allows you to decompress and read REXPaint's xp file format in a readable tilemap structure. What I did was use this with a custom text class so you can render your REXPaint creations in SFML 2.0!

[eXpl0it3r]

Very cool!

Current Issues

• Dependancy on zlib - Currently I cannot find a way to decompress gzip binary files without using zlib or other external libraries.
• Font Support - SFML only has built-in support for TrueType Fonts (although many developers have implemented their own Bitmap Font classes). Currently the CP437 fontset is fully supported in the class, as is with REXPaint, although other fixed-width TTF fonts may also work assuming they have all the supported characters.

Why is zlib an issue? Writing your own deflate/inflate implementation is not really worth the effort.
SFML supports also other font formats, TTF are just the most common used ones, see here.

[gamepopper]

Why is zlib an issue? Writing your own deflate/inflate implementation is not really worth the effort.
SFML supports also other font formats, TTF are just the most common used ones, see here.

The issues were ones I were concerned with, mainly if people might be put off with linking another library to their projects. The second one I thought text were limited to TTF, and that REXPaint's were based on bitmap fonts, but if other font options are available then it's not much of an issue then.