Quote Originally Posted by cairnswm
Any BMP font builder is cool. If you do want to convert to some binary format consider these two things:
1: Only one external resource for one font (ie include the image and the sizing info in one file)
2: keep the facility to use normal image files also - I typically generate a font and infclude it in my games - my artist then uses his tool to modify the raw image and test it in game - this is done remotely so having to continually binarize the file info would add a lot of overhead.
1. Yeah, that is the general idea of making the binary format, to merge the .fnt and the .tga file BMFont generates. And speed up loading as the .fnt file is a text file containing the character widhts, spacings etc.
2. Loading font as normal images should be no problems, but the issue is the .fnt files, without it the engine wont know where to place the characters as the font generator doesn't place them in a normal grid. However, why not sending him the binary font compiler to (will basicly just be a program with an opendialog for the .fnt and the .tga file that them generates the binary font file.

Quote Originally Posted by jdarling
As a side thought, something that has always annoied the hell out of me about packages with image collections is that they don't let you have different image sizes throughout the image lib.

Could we put a flag in that lets you either setup a pattern width/height or setup the pattern rectangles yourself? I've hacked this into just about every library that I've used. Some of the graphic files I've found in the past had all of the game graphics in one file. To re-build the game you either had to re-cut the graphics (painful) or setup your engine to allow for patterns at different points.

Just my two cents again .
Dont worry, the image library will for certain support different size images in the resource files, whatever the format will be. (GLXTreem supports this already).

PatternWidth + PatternHeight is already supported, but making different sized patterns for each image is not supported, probably wont be either (not saying its not possible to do this yourself without modifying the image code as the displaylist is exposed just that it won't be built-in)