Wednesday 27 February 2008

Text rendering

Text rendering started working last night, after I chased down a few more GLSL peculiarities. I'm using the alpha-tested magnification stuff from Team Fortress 2, although my font texture is not quite as nice as theirs. I should probably use a bigger, shinier base texture and spend more time on my signed distance field generation, but it's good enough for now.

Now I desperately need some kind of input filtering. The current input scheme works well for continuous game use, but makes typing impossible and frame rate dependent. After that... well, I'm going to violently insert a SQLite and LuaJava system and see where things go from there.

The former raises a whole slew of questions, of course. Most importantly, some elegant way to convert from table data to game entities (and vice versa) will be essential, not only for making the database useful but also for game saving and loading. Binary serialisation with the Scala BytePickler utilities or some alternative is possible for the latter (if they aren't also implemented as databases), but doesn't really help with the former. Java serialisation... well, it might work. I suspect it'll be horrible.

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