For me, I prefer to use MingLiu font series, size 9. I'm okay with people using Consolas or Courier New, but I liked how MingLiu looks.

How did I come across this font?

Back in college, starting my first freshman semester, I was introduced to this particular font for the first time when I finished installing Visual Studios 2008 Express on my computer. Some people may express confusion, as they don't always have MingLiu as their default font in Visual Studios, especially when its their first time running the IDE.

How does it look?

MingLiu fonts are particularly thin, as in slim text, unlike the other default fonts counterparts, such as Consolas and Courier New. You can see the comparison image below. I used Visual Studios 2012 to create the comparison.

Why choose this font over the others?

Since MingLiu is more thinner than the others, it gives more room/space on your screen while you're programming/debugging. MingLiu is also monospaced, so you don't have to worry about texts not aligned properly with other lines, which kind of looks nice for some people.

Are there any flaws with this font?

Other than that some computers don't exactly have this font, or some computers may have this font under another alias, ???, I haven't come across anything that may give off as a flaw.

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So, what fonts have you preferred? Can you show us how the font looked like if you are using certain fonts not usually used commonly?

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For first world anarchists: (Showcard Gothic fonts, sized 12)

I prefer Google Droid Sans Mono

Hi,

The disadvantage with "thin" is that it can look more pixelated than thicker font, in my opinion. As for style, well, that is just a matter of opinion, too.

Hi,

The disadvantage with "thin" is that it can look more pixelated than thicker font, in my opinion. As for style, well, that is just a matter of opinion, too.

I see.

Unrelated, but if you have a medium-res 4:3 monitor (like me who have to work with 1024x768 monitors only), I see no problematic pixelated-ness. When the font is displayed, the blurriness seemed to mask over the thinness of the font style.

I'm more curious to see why people would forgo wider font types than thinner font types. Wider font types would encourage more newlines and less nested methods, while the thinner font types would encourage more streamlined chained functions and longer (but more readable) variable and function names.

My personal feeling on it is to find a balance that pleases the most people, since there is varied taste in what looks good. There is no substitute for market research, which you are partly doing here, but you need to do targeted research at your largest end user group.

The thinking in Germany is "form follows function" - gaining elsewhere in the world, which is great for mechanical engineering and ergonomic function. However, for a video game developer this can be a recipe for disaster because video games depend even more heavily on market research than the automobile industry if done well, in my view.

As for nested methods compared to chained functions, there are algorithms which optimize for font and also provide threading if there is heavy scripting of animated font and adding effects (such as lighting, smoke, and much more) as well. I am not a specialist in font coding, but it seems obvious to me - correct me if I am wrong - that chained functions can potentially be a dead end in your advancement with fonts if you want to expand into animations and effects. When dealing with performance issues, then I ask: Have you planned for the necessity of post-processing or being forced into it?

Blurriness is a memory issue, to the best of my knowledge, and not a processing issue. Isn't nesting going to cause blurriness? I thought that separate rendering of elements is the only way to always prevent blurriness. Doesn't nesting really force you to thread the processing to prevent such kinds of conflicts? It seems to me that there all memory allocation problems with nesting. ( Not inherited problems but lack of proper cache management)

Therefore you have to consider what your long term goals are going to be. If you have relatively little use of fonts displayed with your game, then performance is not an issue but end - user preference is always a heavy consideration.

For "light" game development, just use what you personally prefer - nested or ''chain" - unless you have the above goals soon such as font animation and font effects. You should look for software to measure the processor and memory cache allocation results of everything you do in order to be scientific and sure about it. With computers this is easy but with mobile game development it is much more challenging to find such measuring tools.

Thank you for your deep insights.