Curses vs SDL, Which version to use? Also possible font scaling bug in SDL

Game Talk The Garage
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Ive been out of the loop in Cataclysm for awhile, and what ive seen accomplished with the game since my absence has been quite impressive. Look forward to seeing all the changes firsthand.

Anyway, part of why im writing is that im a bit confused as to what the differences between the SDL (Tiles?) and Non-SDL (Curses?) versions are, if someone could enlighten me that would be great.

Possible rendering bug:

I play with Topaz-8 font @ 16 x 18 in the FONTDATA for the Non-SDL version of cataclysm. This fits my screen perfectly at 1920x1080 when setting the viewport to be 32w by 29h. But in order to get proper vertical font scaling in the SDL (tiles) version, i need to set the FONTDATA to 16 x 19 which does not properly fit 1920x1080.

It looks as if the renderer is rendering the font at one vertical pixel/point smaller than it should be in the tiles version, even though its still rendering the vertical spacing properly… So with FONTDATA in the tiles version set to 16x18 its as if its rendering the font at 16x17, but its still rendering the vertical spacing of each tile at 16x18, causing the font to look smaller, despite fitting into the same vertical spacing.

This was tested with SDL (Tiles) and Non-SDL (Curses) version 0.7.1-518-g8226221.

Edit: Added Screenshots. Hard to spot the differences unless you flip back and forth, but then they are quite noticeable.

http://postimg.org/image/sgky9278l/full/ - Curses
http://postimg.org/image/uu34l8kl9/full/ - SDL

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As of the recent non-SDL optimizations and fixes, there shouldn’t be any difference between these two versions.

Edit: Just did a fast comparison, and the SDL version seems to stutter when walking around…

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Update with screenshots. Not sure how useful they will be, but they do illustrate that there is a difference in rendering despite using the same settings in FONTDATA. Something is rendering differently between the two clients. Through playing with different settings i am able to make the font size match by making the font size of the SDL +1 vertical larger than the curses version in the FONTDATA. But when the font sizes match pixel for pixel between SDL and Curses versions, then the window size as well as the vertical spacings between each ‘tile’ do not.