Re: Was: FreeType

Sorry for my bad english... As I read this thread, I started thinking 
about rewriting our text render engine... We render a lot of text, but 
never though about rendering words instead of characters... at this 
point, every Object in the game calls the render engine throu 2 
functions: renderText, invalidateBuffer ... every time, something 
changes, the invalidateBuffer function called, and only one flag for the 
Object set... when the rendering starts, the window system starts 
searching for visible objet.
At this point it's a little complicated so I go pseudo code :)

window system prerender loop:

for all objects
	if(visible(object))
		render->renderText(chache);

window system render loop:

for all objects
	if(visible(object))
		render->renderText(nochache);

renderText(cache)
	if(cache)
	{
		if(!invalidbuffer)
		{
			cachebuffer(buffer);
		}else
		{
			renderDataToBuffer();
		}
	}else
	{
		renderBuffer(buffer);
	}

this way, if a text is unchanged, we have an 
optimised(tristripped)vertex array, with some special attributes, to be 
able to render a text with different fonts... but the idea is if we 
render the text with colors, sizes, etc... to a buffer, and the text is 
usually unchanged between frames, the only thing happening with the 
graphics pipeline, is one call, wich copy's the buffer to the video card 
memory, and if we know, the buffer will not change, we can even bind the 
buffer up to the card...

My question is, can the render words algorithm be faster in the real 
world, and more usable for a game, then our buffer algorithm? My problem 
is when your text does not fit in a 2048x2048 texturemap... then you 
have to store more than one texturemap, and switch between them... I 
think while we are using windows :*((( cause the cost of the render 
calls, we have to minimalize the calls made to the videocard...

What do you think about it?

Peter Balogh
[email protected]
Cheaf Programmer
Complete IT Bt.
Hungary


, and calls the renderText, with parameters to try to prechache the buffers

Brian Hook wrote:
> that's pretty interesting looking, but realistically I would probably 
> be able to get the FT2 font renderer extension working faster than I 
> could sort out FT2 and ctypes, particularly with all the structs and 
> what not that FT2 brandishes.
> 
> Brian
> 
> On Wed, 4 Jan 2006 21:10:45 -0800, Nick Trout wrote:
> 
>>>PyGame.Font rendering when it's not available (or until I get off
>>>my ass and write the same thing I just did for Windows for FT2 in
>>>C).
>>>
>>
>>Ft2.dll + ctypes ?
> 
> 
>>http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/tutorial.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
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