I set myself a few goals today: the first was to sort out a bitmap font routine, to start work on the scroller, and to fix some timing issues (the game is running in a window, and speeds up when the mouse is moved - something suggests that the frame swap isn't being done on every vsync). Thankfully, I managed to get the timing problem sorted out straight away, thanks to a chap at the Cool Creations Forum, so I cracked on with the font routine without delay.
This is really where things start to get interesting, as I can poach someone else's font routine, dissect it and work out how things are done, then make changes and modifications to suit my needs. Which is precisely what I did; I now have a routine which allows for multiple fonts, can centre text according to the font size and screen resolution, and also flash it to get the player's attention. There are a couple of features I'd like to add to this routine, such as scaling, shadows, and colour effects, but that will come later. Seeing as I "borrowed" the font routine from the CC forum, I decided to give something back and posted a few links to bitmap fonts from various demos. Aren't I nice? :)
Spent the rest of the night tinkering with a Map Editor; I've been toying with the idea of writing a decent, open-source editor (I'm going to need one for Citadel anyway, and there are precious few out there which are flexible enough to do what I need). In the traditional fashion, I took a couple of existing editors - both of which were fairly basic - and merged the functionality, adding things like mouse control in the process. After staying up until 6am tracking down bugs, I finally had the thing working. Ah, the joys of code. :)
