Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[James G. <j....@vi...>]

On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 22:45, Steve Baker wrote:
> Ricardo Cruz wrote:
> >  Oh, creating a texture for every character...
> 
> Texture map switching would kill you.

I must admit I don't actually know what that means. Though as I've
already said I was only talking about individual textures for numbers,
not letters, to begin with. As I said in more recent email it now looks
as though I'm not even going to do that.

> > But why not just using a pixmap 
> > format then (rather than the vectorial one - TTF)?
> 
> ...or you could put all the letters into one font texture...
> 
> Oh - wait!  That's how the game was originally written before
> everyone who thought they knew better came along!

The general consensus, even if you don't agree, was that the old gui
sucked and needed replacing. Rather than write a whole new GUI from
scratch code was instead taken from Neverball, which was known to work
well and meet our needs. The Neverball GUI uses SDL_ttf, which was never
an issue in Neverball because it doesn't have much mid-game text, it
mostly gets used just for menu screens.

The in-game text in the old TuxKart was heavily pixellated and very
ugly. Given that SDL_ttf was already being used for the menu screens, by
far the easiest way to fix this problem by just switching the text
drawing calls to use SDL_ttf, rather than using one thing for menu
screens and another for in-game status text.

Also, as much as you'd like this GOTM to end up not working due to
dependency issues/SDL issues, it's not happening. The in game text can
be sorted out in a couple of hours. By far the biggest problem continues
to be the speed of the 3D engine. I don't know much about 3D engines,
and so I don't want to blame anyone or anything in particular for this,
but what I do know is that it's not the fault of SDL or SDL_ttf.

	James