Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

This is one of my oldest Windows programs in C++.
It can generate colorized bitmap fonts from true type fonts with glow effect.

Done on college as hobby around 2005-2006.
I used bitmap fonts from it in most of my programs, until about 2010. Additionally it made the text for my logo, and lastly the speed and gear digits in our game.

📜History

I had a small font tool without GUI, earlier when I was programming in Delphi. This one evolved to be a full featured program with medium size code.

I presented the program at college, during scientific circles session, for 15 minutes. The presentation was also a good experience to have.

It was a nice, useful program for me. Probably difficult to use for others due to only keyboard navigation and value changing. It had a help screen with shortcuts though.

📂Sources

Later I’ve uploaded it to Source Forge and thus it became my first FOSS program. Then I moved to Google Code and when it shut down, moved to GitHub.

Available here.

There were several programs done called bitmap font creator, maker or editor. It was (or still is) a popular thing to do. Both using bitmap fonts and making a program for it.

📊Features

Among other features it allowed quick loading and saving project files and coloring schemes. Also browsing them in its own lists with previews. One could easily pick a scheme for font color and quickly match another for glow.

Glow was computed on CPU and thus rather slow, especially for big font sizes and large textures. I didn’t develop it further after realizing that all this could probably be done with a GPU shader in real time, even with animations, at least for small to medium fonts.