Well, it's been a while, so I'll go ahead and make a post.

A couple weeks ago, I got engaged!  It's exciting and hectic all at the same time.  September 12 is the day, so mark your calendars.

The office for Jamination caught fire and was destroyed on January 17.  We have found new digs, and it is much better than the old building.  It just feels so much more professional.  Of course, I'd have rather not had to deal with a fire, but the new place is nice.  Fortunately, quite a bit of the stuff was backed up.

In personal programming news, I've been working on a game engine for a top-secret platform game.  It's so top secret, not even I'm allowed to know what it is.  When I got around to needing some text, I took another look at some of the tools that are out there.  I've been familiar with Bitmap Font Builder from LMNOpc.com for quite some time.  It is a sufficient little editor for creating some basic font texture maps, but I'm not fond of the license, and it doesn't have very many options.  Next I came across Codehead's Bitmap Font Generator.  This is an EXCELLENT tool, which not only generates the bitmap font, but also exports the widths of each character.  The only reason I didn't end up using CBFG is that the format of the character widths file didn't go well with my engine.  Therefore, I decided to write my own tool (honestly, this is one of the simplest tools we can use, so it's not a big undertaking.)  Since I was going to start from scratch, I decided to make it cross-platform, using wxWidgets for the GUI, and FreeType for the font generation (most other tools use Windows' font rendering, which would make development easier...)

The result is a little tool I call "Hieroglyphics."  The output (and some of the features) are based on TileStudio (the output format is similar to the XML output format used by TileStudio, though eventually I might make it customizable.)  The result is that the fonts can use basically the same code as other tiles (at least for loading them.)  Multiple fontsets may be stored in each project file, which allows for grouping them, if desired.  Also, enough information is stored in the XML file that it may be loaded by the editor for future modifications.  While it isn't exactly finished, it is currently very useful.