Centurion Font
| Format type | Font |
|---|---|
| Max glyph count | 96 |
| Minimum glyph size (pixels) | 0×0 |
| Maximum glyph size (pixels) | 8×? (no real height limitation, but also no real way to use custom-height fonts in-game) |
| Access mode | Indexed |
| Metadata? | None |
| Bitmap glyphs? | Yes |
| Vector glyphs? | No |
| Compressed glyphs? | No |
| Hidden data? | No |
| Games |
The Centurion Font format, used in Centurion: Defender of Rome is a 1-bpp format which starts at index 0x20 and has 0x60 (96) symbols. It defines individual widths per symbol, and supports Y-offsets, but contains no real header.
When drawing text, the game automatically adds a single pixel between all symbols, meaning there are no padding pixels around the symbols in the font.
Font extraction
The game's two fonts are inside the OVL0.OVL file. Not much is known about the format, but the fonts can be found at the following offsets:
- 8x6: 0x154B4 -> 0x157B4 (768 bytes)
- 8x8: 0x1509C -> 0x1545C (960 bytes)
Since the font's data size is based on its height, the fonts can perfectly be extracted, edited and re-inserted into the same space, as long as the overall font height is not changed. Given the fact these fonts have no header, changing their height is useless anyway, unless the data defining what heights the game uses for them is found and edited.
File format
The font has no header, always contains 96 symbols, and does not support widths greater than 8 pixels.
The structure of the file is the following:
| Offset | Data type | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0x00 | UINT8[0x60] | SymbolWidths | Array of bytes indicating the width of each symbol, in pixels. |
| 0x60 | UINT8[0x60] | SymbolYOffsets | Array of bytes indicating the Y-offset of each symbol, in pixels. |
| 0xC0 | BYTE[0x60*height] | SymbolData | Symbol data. |
Since the combined length of the two arrays at the start is always 0x0C bytes, and each line of graphics is always exactly one byte, the overall font height can be calculated as (FileSize - 0xC0) / 0x60. Once you have the height, the whole file can be parsed.
An extra check that can be done for accurate format detection is to see that none of the data in the SymbolWidths array exceeds value '8'.
Image data
The actual images in the font are simple one bit per pixel raster bitmaps, cut off at the width defined in the widths list. The Y-offset allows shifting them down to get a larger overall font height without needing extra bytes for the empty lines at the top.
Tools
The following tools are able to work with files in this format.
| Name | Platform | View images in this format? | Convert/export to another file/format? | Import from another file/format? | Access hidden data? | Edit metadata? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Westwood Font Editor | Windows | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A | N/A |