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New BMFont, now with unicode

Started by September 10, 2006 04:47 PM
14 comments, last by WitchLord 18 years, 5 months ago
I've spent a little time upgrading the bitmap font generator. This time I added support for unicode character sets and an option for packing 4 pages into 1 32bit texture. This latter will require a special shader to render with, but you're saving a lot of space with it. The added support for unicode, has shown that the naïve algorithms that I used without problem before are having serious performance issues. I still need to work on those. Until I get around to that you'll have to be patient if you try to generate the entire chinese character set, but smaller sets are still fast enough. I'd like to thank Manu Evans and other users for the feedback on this little program. You're the ones that give me the inspiration and ideas to continue improving my products.

AngelCode.com - game development and more - Reference DB - game developer references
AngelScript - free scripting library - BMFont - free bitmap font generator - Tower - free puzzle game

The chinese set problem is understandable. It's got how many characters again?
http://jemgine.omnisu.com
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The combined Chinese, Japanese, and Korean unified ideographs character set has over 20.000 characters in it. So, while it is understandable that it takes a while to generate this set I still think BMFont is at least 10 times slower than it has to be.

I'll improve the algorithms, but for now I'll be working on the next version of AngelScript. :)

AngelCode.com - game development and more - Reference DB - game developer references
AngelScript - free scripting library - BMFont - free bitmap font generator - Tower - free puzzle game

You're right. This is a bug in the program that slipped through. I'll fix the code and update the program as soon as possible.

Thanks for letting me know.

Regards,
Andreas

AngelCode.com - game development and more - Reference DB - game developer references
AngelScript - free scripting library - BMFont - free bitmap font generator - Tower - free puzzle game

What was causing this? It's just as fast as always for me.
http://jemgine.omnisu.com
Try visualizing the texture for Arial, with charset ANSI (not unicode). The generation of the texture pages enters what seems to be an endless loop; The counter goes far beyond the 228 characters that are available in the character set.

I'll try to look at the code when I get home today, but I'm not sure if I'll get the time.

AngelCode.com - game development and more - Reference DB - game developer references
AngelScript - free scripting library - BMFont - free bitmap font generator - Tower - free puzzle game

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Indeedly. It worked fine with the font I generated. Terribly odd.

[edit] Or it could be because I didn't install the new version over the old like I thought, and was still running the old one. Never mind. [/edit]

[edit2] And while were on the topic, any chance of a command-line version? I'd like to be able to add font generation as a build step. [/edit2]
http://jemgine.omnisu.com
I've fixed the bug. The new version is available from the site.

Just before reading your post I came up with a satisfying solution for generating fonts through a command line option. What I intend to do is to allow the user to save the font configuration from the GUI in an XML file. Through a command line argument the app can automatically generate a new font file from the XML file without user interaction. The XML file can of course also be generated by a third party tool, if that should be preferred.

This will hopefully be in the next version.

AngelCode.com - game development and more - Reference DB - game developer references
AngelScript - free scripting library - BMFont - free bitmap font generator - Tower - free puzzle game

Damn, I didn't spot that yesterday when saving the non-unicode font. It's probably the same bug.

I'll fix this as well a.s.a.p.

Thanks.

AngelCode.com - game development and more - Reference DB - game developer references
AngelScript - free scripting library - BMFont - free bitmap font generator - Tower - free puzzle game

I can't reproduce this problem, and looking at the code there shouldn't be a problem with the kerning pairs.

Do you mind showing me some more information? For example the generated fnt file and the settings you used to generate this file?

Regards,
Andreas

AngelCode.com - game development and more - Reference DB - game developer references
AngelScript - free scripting library - BMFont - free bitmap font generator - Tower - free puzzle game

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