How to write vertical text?
by Cosmic Logic · in Torque X 2D · 10/23/2010 (7:05 am) · 5 replies
Hey,
I'm getting in to optimization for the first time in my game-making career and, needless to say, I'm learning a lot.
One thing I'm trying to do is merely write the player's name vertically down the side. It works and all, except it's taking 29-42% (60-70% on my PC) of my total processing time on the xbox.
All I've done is taken the gamer tag string, broken it down and added a newline after every letter. I've then put this new string in to a GUIMLText.
The problem with how GUIMLText works is that it calls a draw command on every newline, or in this case every letter. That's 8 individual draw calls per frame with my gamertag (including the space...).
Is there a better way to do this? I'm not particularly familiar with basic XNA draw commands. I started with Torque X. But, if there's a way to manually write out these strings that would be awesome.
I'm getting in to optimization for the first time in my game-making career and, needless to say, I'm learning a lot.
One thing I'm trying to do is merely write the player's name vertically down the side. It works and all, except it's taking 29-42% (60-70% on my PC) of my total processing time on the xbox.
All I've done is taken the gamer tag string, broken it down and added a newline after every letter. I've then put this new string in to a GUIMLText.
The problem with how GUIMLText works is that it calls a draw command on every newline, or in this case every letter. That's 8 individual draw calls per frame with my gamertag (including the space...).
Is there a better way to do this? I'm not particularly familiar with basic XNA draw commands. I started with Torque X. But, if there's a way to manually write out these strings that would be awesome.
#2
Thanks.
10/23/2010 (5:54 pm)
Awesome. I'll hit up the Creator's club website to find out how to do that. I was thinking something like that must be possible.Thanks.
#3
It should be "Light Weight" and will have the ability to rotate it.
10/27/2010 (2:52 am)
I am going to be working on a "text to image" component in the next few days that will allow one to display text or numbers from a string form into a rendered graphical text. The component will use a sprite sheet that contains pre-rendered numbers and letters and then will be able to transform any text into the graphical format.It should be "Light Weight" and will have the ability to rotate it.
#4
NOTE: spritefonts can be provided to XNA as a simple bitmap, so you can pre-render or modify the font in anyway you like before adding it to your game.
10/27/2010 (1:15 pm)
A better option would be to use XNA text rendering to render using a spritefont instead of using a spritesheet (a spritefont being essentially a spritesheet for text).NOTE: spritefonts can be provided to XNA as a simple bitmap, so you can pre-render or modify the font in anyway you like before adding it to your game.
#5
10/28/2010 (3:23 am)
Rendering it to a texture and then making a material out of it was super lightweight. I can toss you the code if you want it. It's pretty simple. From there you can just set that material on a sceneobject and then you can rotate it all you like. 
Torque Owner Duncan Colvin