Fonts break in Ventura build attempt

[jserio1869]

Hi Richard,

I am still trying to keep my fork alive, but it seems the update to MacOS 13 "Ventura" has caused a problem I'm not yet able to solve. It appears that everything will still build fine (with some warnings) as of my last commit, but then all of the text appears squished, even though the rest of the game still works as expected. I suspect it is something inside the Mac_Resource file for interpreting the fonts or in general something in the maclib that breaks, but have not yet found the issue...

[richardjs]

Interesting! I get the exact same thing on my Linux system, so that suggests it's not limited to Mac. Maybe it's an SDL issue.

[jserio1869]

I am thinking you may be correct. I was on version 1.2.15 of SDL which is what is available through Macports. I know that there is a git repo of SDL 1.2 out there, but then I don't know what version of SDL_net I would use, which is also required. I found a current email address for Sam Lantinga, and reached out to him on a whim - I will see if he has any ideas for us.

[richardjs]

Interestingly, a different Linux machine I have compiled and ran it with no font issues. I ran a package upgrade and the fonts broke. So that continues to confirm our thinking.

Here are the SDL packages that were updated (these are Arch packages):

sdl12-compat 1.2.56-1 -> sdl12-compat 1.2.60-1
sdl2 2.24.1-1 23 -> sdl2 2.24.2-1

[richardjs]

Something in maclib/Mac_FontServ.cpp seems like a potential culprit, but haven't looked too closely yet.

[richardjs]

Another data point: I tried the same binary on an up-to-date Ubuntu Server 22.04 system and an up-to-date Arch system. It was broken on Arch but worked on Ubuntu 22.04. So that suggests something dynamically linked that Ubuntu 22.04 keeps on an older version.

[jserio1869]

Hi Richard,

So I exchanged some emails with Sam Lantinga. After some intro emails on the issue:

On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 10:12 PM Sam Lantinga <slouken@libsdl.org> wrote:
I'm seeing the same problem with fonts, using sdl12-compat and the latest SDL2. I'll take a look, thanks!

Reported, and fixed!
Maelstrom text rendering squished · Issue #274 · libsdl-org/sdl12-compat (github.com)

He also let me know -
FYI, this is the official Maelstrom repo:
https://github.com/libsdl-org/Maelstrom

So it appears the issue is indeed in SDL, and that it has been dealt with as of yesterday. I'm working on getting an installation of the GitHub version into my setup.

[richardjs]

Great! I'll add a link to to the official repo. Thanks for contacting Sam.