Re: [GD-General] Scaling GUI graphics

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Jun 25, 2002 at 11:09 -0500, brian hook wrote:
> > Note: you don't have to render into a bitmap -- you could render
> > directly using OpenGL/D3D.  Dunno if you're already assuming a 3D API
> > though.
> 
> Did you mean glLine/glPoint calls?

Not sure what glLine is, but yeah,
glBegin(GL_{POINTS,LINES,LINE_STRIP,LINE_LOOP}) or whatever.  Or use
artist-painted UI elements, and scale/tile them using triangles/quads
(that's what we did in Soul Ride).

> > FreeType (http://www.freetype.org) makes high quality output; it's
> > what XFree86 uses these days.
> 
> Cool, I'll check it out, thanks.
> 
> I use that one would need a freely redistributable TTF fonts (are the 
> Windows ones in the free and clear?  I doubt it).

Heh, I think you're right.  MS's web fonts are good quality and free
as in beer, but I imagine there are limits on redistribution.  Debian
Linux actually includes a package that downloads the fonts from MS's
web site and installs them, so the fonts themselves aren't actually in
the distro.  That's probably too complicated an approach to rely on
for a mass market game though.

What we did in Soul Ride, which worked well I think, was the artist
made antialiased bitmapped fonts in Photoshop (from TrueType source
fonts), and we rendered using alpha blending.  Scaling worked fine;
the antialiasing will obviously work better if you don't scale too
radically, but over a factor of 2 or 3x, they looked pretty nice IMO.

The MS fonts are the only scalable fonts that don't look like total
crap on my Linux box, so I suspect you won't find good free hinted TT
fonts.  Although antialiasing would help.

One of my super back-burner projects is a public domain Flash
parser/renderer.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com