Texture Fonts or System Fonts?

Sabrina · Oct 24th 2006, 6:37pm

Hi guys!

Which is better texture fonts (i.e .bmp, .tga, etc.) or System fonts (ie.CreateFont(...) )? Here are some of my arguments: (I might be wrong here so please advise.)

System Fonts:
1) Easier to program.
2) Font is already on users computer. (the default ones)
3) You can use "language friendly fonts". You can use UNICODE and load user language(s).
4) Can't adjust font size. (at run-time)

Texture Fonts:
1) Cooler fonts.
2) Not language friendly, you would need 101 texture fonts for 101 languages.
3) Instant adjustment of font size.

IF you have your "XOR" choice, which would it be? What's your argument? BRING'EM ON BOYS!!

Me.

Kain · Oct 24th 2006, 11:53pm

For PC, System Fonts. There just isn't enough benefit to texture fonts when you have tools like Fontographer to make your own system fonts.

For console or anything cross-platform that touches a console, Texture Fonts. It's a requirement.

Sabrina · Oct 26th 2006, 5:41pm

Thanks Kain for the info! I've been re-working my font classes and have been struggling (pros and cons) on which method to use. If you pros go with system fonts, then I will too

There is one problem I don't like about the system fonts and thats you can't (I think) change the font size at run-time. Correct me if I'm wrong though. Kinda makes it hard to do 'special effects'.

Me.

rezination · Oct 27th 2006, 4:25pm

I'm pretty sure Barbie was all texture fonts, but there was very little text in the game and we wanted it all to look super fancy.

Why not support both? Make a text rendering interface and sub-class it with a TextureFont and SystemFont class. That way you can get the best of both worlds and switching from system fonts to texture fonts should be pretty easy (not including assets).

-Rez

Sabrina · Oct 27th 2006, 5:20pm

Hi Rez!

I have decided to support both texture and system fonts, then make a manager and factory to support them. I guess for now my factory will determine if there is a provision for texture fonts in a script (Kinda like, does a texture font exits in in my script, if not use a system font). Thanks for the info! Keep'em comming

Me

rezination · Oct 27th 2006, 5:30pm

That's how we deal with texture resources. We find a texture by filename (minus the extention), like "locker2". Then is searches, in order, for "locker2.dds", "locker2.png", "locker2.bmp". Doing something similar sounds like a good idea for fonts.

Just make sure you sufficiently abstract your text routines so that you can seemlessly move from one to the other. Trust me, it will save you headaches down the road.

-Rez

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