Bitmap Font Generator

[Sly]

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?

In order of ease of development:
- Xbox 360. The toolset provided by Microsoft is absolutely brilliant. It's just like debugging on a remote PC.
- Wii. If you have developed for Gamecube, then Wii is pretty much the same. It's an overclocked Gamecube. Same development tools, very similar hardware.
- PS3. If I say what I really think, Sony might sue me for defamation.

[Nitrogen]

I've been busy with Font Studio...



This shot shows the custom-drawn font combobox, which looks just like the professional one seen in applications such as MS Word or Photoshop. It also shows the binary space partitioning algorithm which packs the characters into the texture, and finally it indirectly shows the multithreaded nature of the program. It uses a separate rendering thread to generate the font texture.

[LP]

Nitrogen, that's a nice job! Does it save the rectangle information for individual letters? Any way to put this information in an XML file?

[Nitrogen]

Yes. it generates a set of texture coordinates for each character as well as their ABC widths (A being leading space, B being total width, C being trailing space) as defined inside the font file, so you can render them *exactly* how windows renders it!

With the file formats, I'm going to be flexible.. offering JPG and TGA at first with embedded font info, then adding XML and PNG support later.

[vgo]

I'm using your font generator/library in my engine. It's so good that there's no point to even try to make one myself!

Thanks a lot!

[Nitrogen]

Cool! thats the idea..

But dont get too comfortable with v3, when this version is done you'll have to re-create your fonts but everything else should work mostly the same...

[fireton]

I've just released version 3.0 of my bitmap font generator: Font Studio.

Please take a look at HGE font editor (http://hge.relishgames.com).

[Robert Kosek]

Please take a look at HGE font editor (http://hge.relishgames.com).

Look at what? No screenshots, standalone distribution of the editor, or anything. Nitrogen's work has been around for a long time here, so I don't know what you're getting at. From what little I did manage to find, I saw that Nitrogen's work is better.

[Nitrogen]

I did take a look at it.. It's got quite a nice custom interface (though I did have some trouble clicking the scrollbars), and seems to be at the same stage of development as my Font Studio v3..

One thing I like is the antialiasing.. I've still got to get that down on my Font Studio...

[chronozphere]

@Nitrogen. I have a question about the format you save your data in.

In the font4.pas unit i found this datastructure??

[pascal]
type FontInfo = record
A, C: integer;
Wid, Hgt: cardinal;
char: WideChar;
x1,y1,x2,y2: double;
end;
[/pascal]

Can you explain what the different fields mean??
I get the (x1,y1,x2,y2) Rectangle on the texture but e.g i can't figure out what A and C contain?
Can you explain that please??

Thanx!