Happy Holidays from the Neos team and polish for the new text rendering system
Welcome again to our weekly update!
We all hope that you’re having great holidays so far and spending time with your friends and family. You may have thought we were taking a break for Christmas, but Frooxius has been hard at work getting the bugs out and polishing the new text rendering system!
Nevertheless this week has been quieter, as we all spent time with our family. If you’re reading this right at the release and have some time to spare, join us for a livestream right now on Twitch!
[h2]Text rendering system polish[/h2]
After the initial release of the new text rendering system this Sunday, it has received a lot of extra polish to fix-up various issues and improve the quality of the rendering. For example glyphs randomly becoming blank were fixed, as well as rounding errors in calculations causing some of the symbols to become deformed or smaller than they should be, especially characters like dashes, hyphens, commas, periods, semicolons and so on.
Unicode coverage has been improved as well, the system now handles characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane as well, assuming they don’t require complex shaping (e.g. Arabic) and extra fallback fonts (Noto Symbols 2 and Noto Math) were added for various symbols, like arrows, shapes and other small graphics.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Parsing of some missing tags and parameters was also fixed up as well as some line-wrapping layout issues, so most of the existing text should work the same way it did before with no manual fixes necessary. If you still encounter any issues, let us know in the Discord!
The system should be pretty reliable now, so the work has already started on designing a new UI framework around it to replace the current system and allow us to start on the UI/UX overhaul.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
Secret Santa and Christmas Megajam!
The Secret Santa gift giving ceremony has gone underway and all of the participants have opened their presents, with many others joining in as well!
Frooxius got a bowl of delicious fruit from ProbablePrime, which he promptly scarfed down!
So many more gifts were given this night, and you can see all of the presents being unwrapped here in the Christmas Megajam video!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Kurotori’s Japanese Keyboard
We’ve had a user making great use of our new Text Rendering engine, utilizing LogiX and built-in buttons to make a keyboard for typing in Japanese. Awesome job, Kurotori!
[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
The work has already begun on engineering a brand new UI framework for Neos, that will replace the current one built around the Unity UI, which is currently one of the oldest and ugliest parts of the codebase.
Similarly to the text rendering, this will be a fully custom system, designed to be asynchronous, multi-threaded and generally highly performant.
It will also give us a full level of control over the UI and ability to quickly and easily build new UI elements and interactions. Using this we’ll be able to overhaul the actual look and feel of Neos’ UI and ensure long term growth of the platform.
We thank you all for being with us throughout this year! The Neos team is hoping you’ve had a happy holiday season and wish you to have a very happy New Year. We’re all very excited to see what the next year and even the next decade brings, and we’re so happy to have you along with us!
We all hope that you’re having great holidays so far and spending time with your friends and family. You may have thought we were taking a break for Christmas, but Frooxius has been hard at work getting the bugs out and polishing the new text rendering system!
Nevertheless this week has been quieter, as we all spent time with our family. If you’re reading this right at the release and have some time to spare, join us for a livestream right now on Twitch!
[h2]Text rendering system polish[/h2]
After the initial release of the new text rendering system this Sunday, it has received a lot of extra polish to fix-up various issues and improve the quality of the rendering. For example glyphs randomly becoming blank were fixed, as well as rounding errors in calculations causing some of the symbols to become deformed or smaller than they should be, especially characters like dashes, hyphens, commas, periods, semicolons and so on.
Unicode coverage has been improved as well, the system now handles characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane as well, assuming they don’t require complex shaping (e.g. Arabic) and extra fallback fonts (Noto Symbols 2 and Noto Math) were added for various symbols, like arrows, shapes and other small graphics.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Parsing of some missing tags and parameters was also fixed up as well as some line-wrapping layout issues, so most of the existing text should work the same way it did before with no manual fixes necessary. If you still encounter any issues, let us know in the Discord!
The system should be pretty reliable now, so the work has already started on designing a new UI framework around it to replace the current system and allow us to start on the UI/UX overhaul.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
Secret Santa and Christmas Megajam!
The Secret Santa gift giving ceremony has gone underway and all of the participants have opened their presents, with many others joining in as well!
Frooxius got a bowl of delicious fruit from ProbablePrime, which he promptly scarfed down!
So many more gifts were given this night, and you can see all of the presents being unwrapped here in the Christmas Megajam video!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Kurotori’s Japanese Keyboard
We’ve had a user making great use of our new Text Rendering engine, utilizing LogiX and built-in buttons to make a keyboard for typing in Japanese. Awesome job, Kurotori!
[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
The work has already begun on engineering a brand new UI framework for Neos, that will replace the current one built around the Unity UI, which is currently one of the oldest and ugliest parts of the codebase.
Similarly to the text rendering, this will be a fully custom system, designed to be asynchronous, multi-threaded and generally highly performant.
It will also give us a full level of control over the UI and ability to quickly and easily build new UI elements and interactions. Using this we’ll be able to overhaul the actual look and feel of Neos’ UI and ensure long term growth of the platform.
We thank you all for being with us throughout this year! The Neos team is hoping you’ve had a happy holiday season and wish you to have a very happy New Year. We’re all very excited to see what the next year and even the next decade brings, and we’re so happy to have you along with us!