RE: [GD-General] Scaling GUI graphics

[Brian S. <bs...@mi...>]

> > > FreeType (http://www.freetype.org) makes high quality output; it's
> > > what XFree86 uses these days.
> >=20
> > Cool, I'll check it out, thanks.
> >=20
> > I use that one would need a freely redistributable TTF=20
> fonts (are the=20
> > Windows ones in the free and clear?  I doubt it).
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.

I've done this in the past too, and it looks pretty good.  The downside
is that if you just render a string by rendering individual characters,
you don't get nice things like pair kerning and ligature substitution
that make your text look really high-quality...still, for the average
game that's overkill.

I'm ignorant of the legal issues involved, but it seems like it should
be technically possible to process a TTF font into a bitmap font via
freetype and end up with something that you can use in your game...

--brian