Bitmap Font Generator

[Chesso]

Ok, well from what I have seen so far, is that TPowerFont with UnDelphiX, has the characters in a specific order in the image, and you basically tell it the bounding box (just like with images and the TImageList).

so each character might have a space of 22x22 or some such and then of course they will have a specific row and column set and order the characters go in (so the components knows exactly what is what).

[Zampoteh]

1. A nice thing, but useless for us, Russians.

That supports russian: http://font2pic.narod.ru/

[Sly]

Have you seen AngelCode's BMFont? It supports Unicode very well, and I've yet to find another font bitmap maker that packs so many characters onto a bitmap.

[Nitrogen]

Thats kind of what Fontstudio 4 will look like.

Well, I've been busy with FontStudio and it's taken a surprising amount of time. I still havent got halfway to implementing a full product yet, but I have built a better Character Map than the one included with windows..



You can switch between the entire unicode range (up to 65532 characters) or just the characters that are supported by this font. And each one is selectable for use in the bitmap font, and colour coded by codepage.

I've written a binary 2d-space partitioning tree algorithm to pack the characters into the texture, so we'll soon see how effective it is... And I hope to take advantage of todays processors by getting the drawing of the font and the generating of the mask happening in another thread..

It's surprisingly hard to design a system like this one where the user needs to quickly preview the current settings, but generating the preview takes time.. You have to find a way around having to recalculate everything every time something changes..

Unfortunately the next version of Font Studio will not be fully backwards compatible, and you wont be able to load fs3 files using the (to be written) Font4.pas unit..

[Sly]

A very useful feature of AngelCode's BMFont, the font creator that Microsoft provides with the Xbox 360 development kit, and bmfontgen (for use with XNA) is that the user can supply a text file containing all the text that the game will use. The font creator will then only include the characters in the text file. This means that every character included in the font is used at least once and not wasting space on the texture.

[Nitrogen]

Simple enough to implement, I'll add it in when Microsoft uses FontStudio for it's XBox dev kit

[LP]

I don't get it, what is the use of Unicode in bitmap font renderer? Are you going to render >10000 characters like in Chinese and put all of them on textures? I mean, if specific ANSI charset has 256 characters, this is still "okay" (with larger letters you get 1024x1024 texture or 4+ 256x256 textures), but using Unicode implies you get >256 characters in your bitmap font, which implies that using pre-rendered letters at start is a bad approach anyway. You may get better results rendering the required letters in real-time on some sort of cache - perhaps something similar to what D3DXFont does.

By the way, before releasing first Asphyre 4 snapshot I had thoughts on using your font studio but after making few tests and getting the same pixel and edge artifacts I've had in FontRender back in PowerDraw days, I've had no choice but to work on updated Asphyre FontTool.

Edit: I suggest you test your tool with different font sizes (smaller ones, especially) and different settings first and fix all existing bugs before working on additional features.

For instance, you can start by fixing this:

[Sly]

In my current Xbox 360 project, which is likely to be released in 18 different languages, all user-visible text is stored as UTF-8. We will have at least 3000 Asian characters (Japanese, Chinese at a minimum) pre-rendered on textures. We will be using the feature I mentioned before of only including the charactres that are actually used in the text.

Rendering characters on demand into a cache does not allow very good anti-aliasing, outlining and shadow effects, or special graphic filters to be applied to the bitmap. These effects all take time to render, which is better done as a pre-processing step before it gets into the game.

[savage]

In my current Xbox 360 project,

Krome's coming soon section hasn't listed any Next Gen games yet. Without risk of losing your job, what is your opinion of which console ( Wii, XB360 or PS3 ) is easiest to develop for?

[Nitrogen]

I suggest you test your tool with different font sizes (smaller ones, especially) and different settings first and fix all existing bugs before working on additional features.

Agreed. It's actually very simple to fix that, and I should have thought of making it fix it automatically, but I was working on the assumption that the user would like to tweak the font him/herself. Thats what you get when you playtest your own programs! *doh*

Instead of adding new features on top of old code, I'm actually going for a whole rewrite of the entire thing, which will fix and remove all of those types of glitches.

I don't get it, what is the use of Unicode in bitmap font renderer?

If you have an international game you HAVE to use unicode. The one example that really stands out as a good unicode compatible game is Track Mania Nations. People from all round the world play and it can handle Russian, Chinese, Korean chat text ingame. Using, you guessed it, bitmap fonts.