Re: [GD-General] FreeType

[<cas...@ya...>]

Tom Spilman wrote:
>     We we're using it at one point in a racing game, but i scrapped it as
> our implementation with it was slow and at the time there was a patent
issue
> with FreeType's hinter.  We ended up replacing the entire system with a
> simple bitmap font solution.  At the time we we're using FreeType2 and we
> did have several memory leaks that we believe we're internal to it.  My
> understanding is that all these issues have been corrected now.  If i
we're
> to do it again i would consider using FreeType to build the bitmap fonts
at
> startup, but allow for overloading that behavior if the bitmap already
> exists in the game data.

I've written a simple font engine based on FreeType2 recently, and I've
never had any problem with the FreeType2 library. The latest FreeType's
autohinter is as good as the patented one. I generate a bitmap font for each
page of unicode on request, and I use a font size that depends on the screen
resolution, it works fine, and I'm quite happy with it. The only problem so
far is that the generation of the font bitmaps is a bit slow, and if the
bitmap is generated on runtime it produces a small hiccup, but I'm planning
to cache on disk the fonts that have been generated recently to avoid that.


Ignacio Castaño
cas...@ya...