Hi all,

What, if anything, are all of you doing to add 3D and/or bitmap text to your JOGL programs?  Normally, this is an OS specific thing.  How are you working around it?

It looks like GLUT might be a possible solution.  If this is the case, do you have to distribute glut.dll with everything?

Thanks,
Shaddam IV

How'd the bitmap/texture text work for you performance wise? I was considering adding that to my engine, but never got around to doing it - spending a lot of time working on tools.

Yeah, I did the mosaic method and I wasn't pleased with the limitations and the quality. That's the system I have in place now, but I hate it. I used it to avoid texture memory fragmentation - that's why I was curious about your performance.

Compositing all of the fonts into one big texture caused some issues when the resulting texture was broken up into mipmaps - halo'ing and such.

ok. I see

I use the mosaic mothod I think. The font is created in adobe photoshop, then parsed inn and stored in a single texture with each character getting there own rectangle inside the texture. I guess it could be generated by using awt, but I wanted it to be flexible enough to support hand made bitmap fonts. And adobe does nice antialiasing

It is used by my menus and overlays. I've limited the use of the font so that it is never scaled, and is drawn in screen space. I don't use mipmapping and I disable all filtering. I also make sure that it is properly aligned with the screen, so that the texture is mapped 1:1 to the screen. If I did not do this it looked like crap, because it got scaled and mangled.

But I agree that this method is not an option when using mipmaps.