True Type Font Support

[zimluura]

does anyone think true type font support would be a good thing to add to vdrift?

recently, through modifying the nehe freetype tutorial, i got a little font demo application done that loads the first 0-255 characters into a single texture and stores uv coordinates and position data for each. so if this would be desired i've got allot of the code written to do it.

[joevenzon]

If you're interested in digging into VDrift fonts:

The font rendering in VDrift is pretty nifty, it uses a distance field (if you have shaders enabled) which, using only a small bitmap, provides exceptionally high quality (with antialiasing) even when the lettering is huge... and hardly uses any resources. It's an application of this:
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publication...cation.pdf
to fonts.

The font generator I use to create the distance fields is this one:
http://www.lonesock.net/files/SDFont.zip
from this thread:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/..._id=491938

You can fiddle with adding/changing fonts; the program outputs .png and .txt files and those can be copied over the ones in VDrift/data/skins/simple/fonts if you want to see them in-game.

[zimluura]

hmm, cool!

i'm not actually that interested in fonts. just did a bunch of work with them recently in order to get a quick ttf bolt-on for any opengl apps i try to build in the future.

it looks like vdrift has a different system that offers some benefits over vanilla ttf.

[joevenzon]

Yeah, so it does use TTF fonts sort of, but they have to be processed by a separate program first.