3D and bitmap text in JOGL

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

Hi all,

What, if anything, are all of you doing to add 3D and/or bitmap text to your JOGL programs? Normally, this is an OS specific thing. How are you working around it?

It looks like GLUT might be a possible solution. If this is the case, do you have to distribute glut.dll with everything?

Thanks,
Shaddam IV

#2

For bitmap text, I made a wrapper for AWT fonts, that renders each character into a separate bitmap. I then just use the technique described in chapter eight of the OpenGL programmer’s guide (cfr. section ‘Fonts and display lists’
For 3D text you could also use GLF. There’s a port of it in one of the nehe lessons. Lesson 15 IIRC.

#3

How’d the bitmap/texture text work for you performance wise? I was considering adding that to my engine, but never got around to doing it - spending a lot of time working on tools.

#4

I’m not sure about the performance, since I haven’t had time to benchmark it yet, but it seems ok.
I implemented the mosaic texture/quads technique too, but I wasn’t really happy with the quality I got from that, so I dropped it.

#5

Yeah, I did the mosaic method and I wasn’t pleased with the limitations and the quality. That’s the system I have in place now, but I hate it. I used it to avoid texture memory fragmentation - that’s why I was curious about your performance.

#6

what quility issues did you have with mosaic method? Don’t see why it should give any less quility than any other method.

#7

Compositing all of the fonts into one big texture caused some issues when the resulting texture was broken up into mipmaps - halo’ing and such.

#8

Tom: when I use the bitmaps (glBitmap, not textures) my text is very crisp. I was never able to get quite the same result using textures.

#9

ok. I see :slight_smile:

I use the mosaic mothod I think. The font is created in adobe photoshop, then parsed inn and stored in a single texture with each character getting there own rectangle inside the texture. I guess it could be generated by using awt, but I wanted it to be flexible enough to support hand made bitmap fonts. And adobe does nice antialiasing :slight_smile:

It is used by my menus and overlays. I’ve limited the use of the font so that it is never scaled, and is drawn in screen space. I don’t use mipmapping and I disable all filtering. I also make sure that it is properly aligned with the screen, so that the texture is mapped 1:1 to the screen. If I did not do this it looked like crap, because it got scaled and mangled.

But I agree that this method is not an option when using mipmaps.