I see, I misunderstood your previous response. I was thinking you were talking about an overlay view on top of the OpenGL view. What you're saying is also an approach that seems to be practically used by Android game developers. It works well for static common messages. However, if you're dealing with text messages that change quite often you'll have to resort to a different technique. Score numbers or character dialogs are typically often updated for example.
So to sum it up we have the following options: - Use an overlay view to render text with Canvas - Use Canvas to create a texture map with all used characters for the current locale (and I agree, that looks like a big PITA unless you're supporting just a single or a few languages) - Use Canvas to create textures (or a texture map) with all words and sentences used by the game / app On Thursday, January 31, 2013 11:50:20 AM UTC-6, latimerius wrote: > > Hm, I'm not sure I'm following you. What I have in mind is > > - make a new Paint, setTypeface() and setTextSize() on it > - take a string to render, measure it using getTextBounds() > - create a Canvas, setting it a Bitmap (usually a Bitmap of bounds > width*height, both taken to the next power of two if you'll want to use it > directly as a GL texture) > - draw your text to the bitmap by calling drawText() on the Canvas > > Now you have a Bitmap with rendered text that you can use as any other > texture. > > I don't see a need for overlaying a view on top of GLSurfaceView, or any > threading issues (unless you want to render walls of dynamic text (unlikely > for a game) the above only runs once during initialisation, on a thread of > your choice). > > > On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 6:30 PM, Nobu Games <[email protected]<javascript:> > > wrote: > >> Oh, in addition to what I said: >> >> since GL rendering and Android UI are done in two separate threads, there >> is the chance that both text and 3D graphics are not completely in sync. >> This is not much of a problem for HUDs, but it might turn out to be a >> problem when text has to be positioned alongside a moving game object. >> >> >> On Thursday, January 31, 2013 11:23:02 AM UTC-6, Nobu Games wrote: >>> >>> I haven't tested / benchmarked that myself using OpenGL ES, but what I >>> read so far over on Stackoverflow is that developers noticed a performance >>> impact when you have an extra view for rendering text on top of a >>> GLSurfaceView. >>> I only experimented with a custom view with text and graphics rendering >>> on top of a camera preview so far. And the frame rate was acceptable >>> (around 30 FPS on a Galaxy S doing nothing much fancy). >>> >>> However, I do not want to take that approach because I'm currently >>> developing a game engine that has to be portable. Therefore I'm trying to >>> abstract platform-specific details and having fonts being rendered in >>> OpenGL sounds quite portable to me :-) >>> >>> >>> On Thursday, January 31, 2013 10:58:04 AM UTC-6, latimerius wrote: >>>> >>>> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 5:13 PM, Nobu Games <[email protected]>wrote: >>>> >>>>> 2. This seems to be the Android standard approach: pre-render an atlas >>>>> / map texture with all letters and symbols you need using a Bitmap, >>>>> Canvas >>>>> and a font of your choice. The Android tools available are very >>>>> straightforward to use and I guess that'll be the way to go for me. The >>>>> only problem here is: you need to take care of rendering the letters with >>>>> correct spacing and line breaks etc. The letter spacing can be determined >>>>> in the map generation step, though. >>>> >>>> >>>> Why don't you just use Canvas & Paint to render the text(s) you'd like >>>> display? >>>> >>>> Locale handling can turn out a PITA but otherwise, this seems a good >>>> solution to me. Just out of curiosity, what would you gain by doing what >>>> you describe (i.e. using the glyphs but writing you own typesetting code)? >>>> >>>> >>> -- >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Android Developers" group. >> To post to this group, send email to >> [email protected]<javascript:> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected] <javascript:> >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Android Developers" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected] <javascript:>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. >> >> >> > > -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
