Slick Forums

Hey guys,

because of performance (loading) reasons i had the idea to serialize the unicode font and then reload only this when my game starts,
everything goes well but when i display the font i only see "white squares" whitout the font "image" for each character itself..

any idea's?

tx

UnicodeFont is brutally slow at loading. Your options:

• Use bitmap fonts instead (AngelCodeFont). This loads and renders much more quickly.
• If you need a particular feature that AngelCodeFont doesn't support; e.g. truly dynamic fonts, or multiple glyph pages, or a much wider range of code points (e.g. for certain languages), then use TWL's font renderer. This is the best option if you need to use TTFs.
• Don't add any glyphs; instead let the game decide when to add them based on when they are needed in render(). Then, only load a small number of glyphs per frame. If you try to load all the glyphs at once, the game will generally hang. The UnicodeFontTest shows an example where the text is loaded as the game is running (the result is ugly -- glyphs "appearing" individually over a couple seconds).
• Alternatively, if you really feel you need UnicodeFonts, you could "cache" your fonts by storing the resulting GlyphPage textures on the user's system, and on the next load simply grab the cached images and use them as if they were bitmap fonts.

hey davedes,

thank you i'll try some of your options and see what's the best option

cheers

-a-

the hiero application always gives me this error
however it worked last month i think

ava.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeApplication(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeMainClass(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no lwjgl in java.library.path
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at org.lwjgl.Sys$1.run(Sys.java:75)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at org.lwjgl.Sys.doLoadLibrary(Sys.java:68)
at org.lwjgl.Sys.loadLibrary(Sys.java:84)
at org.lwjgl.Sys.<clinit>(Sys.java:101)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.<clinit>(Display.java:128)
at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer$1.run(AppGameContainer.java:39)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.<clinit>(AppGameContainer.java:36)
at org.newdawn.slick.CanvasGameContainer.<init>(CanvasGameContainer.java:48)
at org.newdawn.slick.CanvasGameContainer.<init>(CanvasGameContainer.java:29)
at org.newdawn.slick.tools.hiero.Hiero$3.<init>(Hiero.java:287)
at org.newdawn.slick.tools.hiero.Hiero.initialize(Hiero.java:281)
at org.newdawn.slick.tools.hiero.Hiero.<init>(Hiero.java:156)
at org.newdawn.slick.tools.hiero.Hiero.main(Hiero.java:1196)
... 9 more

You can use the TWL Theme Editor to create bitmap fonts (Tools -> Create font). Select TEXT format when saving the generated font so that Slick can parse it.

_________________
TWL - The Themable Widget Library

cool tx !!

any idea if i can add some gradient in my font (from yellow to red)

ok got it

so at the end, (testing all possibilities for fonts in slick) indeed the best way is to use the Angelcodefont, for performance and "drawing" reasons
before i had this issue when i tried to rotate a "string", the font wasn't properly rendered, angelcode font solved both problems

tx !