Smooth font render in graphic screen mode (no OpenGL! no DX!)

[hd_]

He is busy too. Geez, don't pressure the guy- he offers a service for free, but being abused isn't one of them.

[Leonheart]

OK Kris, the source code is send to ur email. And now, Is became the public code under GNU.

[KristopherWindsor]

Thanks.
It's 800 lines of code, so I should be able to rewrite it today. :--]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]


EDIT: check your email; I have questions.

[Leonheart]

That ur answer, check your email.
I try online on YIM all this day, you can ask anything there.

[KristopherWindsor]

Do you have IRC chat? I see you haven't been to freenode's ##freebasic channel.

[Leonheart]

I can't figure how to register on it

[KristopherWindsor]

I can't figure how to register on it

You don't need to register.
After you connect to freenode, just type:
/join ##freebasic

[Leonheart]

OK, I try to make it work on pidgin then

[KristopherWindsor]

I've got the lib working with my suggestions.
I'll make some final touch-ups and email soon (probably tomorrow).
BTW, adding support for drawing to images was that easy. 

[Leonheart]

OK,

[KristopherWindsor]

Here's a fully working example with my version of the lib:

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#Include Once "abfont.bas"
Dim Shared As abfont.alpha_font font
Screenres 640, 480, 32
Screenlock()
  font.draw(, 10, 10, "OOP XD... BBQ", &HFFFFFFFF)
Screenunlock()
Sleep

I made a lot changes beside OOP and support for drawing to images; I removed a fair amount of code, but the only functionality I removed was support for less than true color screen modes.

I made one bug fix here, for clipping the background color:

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    m=GetTextWidth(ALPHA_ACTIVE_FONT, s)
    'note: this line added by Kristopher Windsor
    If x + m >= ALPHA_SCREEN_WIDTH Then m = ALPHA_SCREEN_WIDTH - x - 1

I also changed the error handling.
Now instead of a function returning a 0, 1, or 2 to report an error, it will just return true / false.
If you want to know the specific error, you can use the errorcheck() function:

Code: Select All | Copy To Clipboard

If font.loadfont("myfont.abf", 2) then print font.errorcheck()

Some other changes include:
- Use of namespaces, overloaded functions, and a BI file for the BAS file
- There are now only 32 slots per font object, not 256. With 256 font slots, each font object was using > 1MB of memory.
- If you try to load a font into a slot where a font is already loaded, you will get an error.
- One or two subs were changed to functions which return error values; also there is more error checking with the font(slot).loaded flag.
- The screen size, current font, and font colors are not saved in the object; you have to specify them with each function call.
- I took the "revision" parameter out of GetAlphaBitmapFontLibVer() because I don't know what that is for.
- Functions that return error codes now return integers, not ubytes. (I think all parameters should be integer or string, but I won't bother to change any more.)
- I removed some functions that were only ~7 lines or less, IE the function to load the standard font (that is done directly by the constructor now).
- I removed a function to reload the standard font since it was never used
- All 5 examples updated to work with the new version
- More changes I forgot

I'll email the code to Leonheart now and hopefully he will let me post my version here.
The library is really nice now, weighing at only 470 (code) + 100 (header) lines, with OOP features, without the bloat of the features planned for future versions, such as scaling, rotation, compressed file formats, and then some.

[KristopherWindsor]

Here's a screenshot of my menu with the font library:



I am using a different font size for each screen size, so I won't need to scale the text (with multiput()) after all.
This way, the fonts will never be pixelated or hard to read.
I really like the font smoothing.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Can I expect an OpenGL implementation?

[KristopherWindsor]

Can I expect an OpenGL implementation?

For this font lib? Did you read the topic title?
But I do need some way to do that when I make my game work with OpenGL.
I might end up just drawing to an FBGFX buffer, than converting that to a texture; I'm not sure yet.

[Leonheart]

The screenshot is cool!

Remember, the code is now Public Release. You can contribute whatever you like. Yes, maybe another contributor will make version for OGL.

Where I must put the code? Since my site will updated about next month. @Kris, maybe you can put it for a while on your site. (While I make the X-Font).