#695 - pollier - Thu Jan 09, 2003 8:21 pm
Hey, I was just wondering how most games today do variable-width fonts; some of them have an awful amount of characters on screen which would take up a large portion of the available sprites, if that's the method they use. Or are we talking about some fancy tile-blitting?
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#696 - Nessie - Thu Jan 09, 2003 8:40 pm
From what I've seen of the Castlevania games, it looks like they use a BG layer and map out the portion (rectangle) they want to display the text on directly to a like-sized section of tile memory...then they just draw the text into the text "window" they've allocated in tile memory. Then hardware just automatically blits the rectangular block of dynamically created tile data to the screen.
I'm probably not describing it very well, but that's what they seem to do.
#699 - Touchstone - Thu Jan 09, 2003 9:02 pm
Blitting your font to a tilemap is probably the most efficient way of doing it since it doesn't require that much tile ram considering you would have to use lots of sprite tile ram instead if drawing your text using sprites. Writing text with sprites opens up the possibility to do lots of cool text effects though, when you can move all the characters independently of each other. :)
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#754 - Quirky - Fri Jan 10, 2003 9:09 am
The sprite approach is quite popular too. You aren't stuck to tile positions then, so you can place text at "nice" vertical distances apart without having to take up too many tiles. Plus, as mentioned you can move letters seperately to each other. Golden sun, for example, uses sprites for text, which allows them to do the "wobbly" text effect.