Comments on: iPhone Game Programming – Tutorial 4 – Bitmap Font Class

By: Day 7: Add bitmap fonts to our iPhone game

Day 7: Add bitmap fonts to our iPhone game — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:02:26 +0000

[...] found from reading various developer and startup blogs. The best one that I have found goes out to Mike Daley of 71Squared! I have also noticed a few other great tutorials on Mike’s site that I may consider for [...]

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By: Asher

Asher — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:00:49 +0000

Actually never mind about the scrolling, just a case of aDelta in the new framework being a fraction of the value of delta in the old (2D) framework. To fix it all you need to do it increase the value’s being input into the animation methods, (or reduce the delays).

Still don’t know why the text alignment is off though. The x and y offsets just don’t seem to be being set.

By: Asher

Asher — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:05:17 +0000

Does anyone have any idea why the text alignment and scrolling might not be working when placed into the new XCode4 openGL framework. So far I’ve got everything else to work, but this seems to go wrong.

I also know it’s not a case of having missed something out, as after encountering the problem I copy/pasted the code from the example project which works perfectly. I’m stumped!

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:35:15 +0000

I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your work. This has been very helpful in getting me started in gaming development. Please keep it up.

By: ThisIsMe

ThisIsMe — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:44:56 +0000

Hello mike,

You might not have heard this before, but your tutorials are great :-)!

We are using the AngelCodeFont class in our iPhone game, and I found a small problem with the Image class.

I use a font I made with Hiero with shadow and outline, and I experienced artifacts on the right and (a bit less obvious) on the left side of characters, which apparently came from neighboring characters in the font bitmap file.

Digging in the code I found the problem: The calculateTexCoordsAtOffset function seems to use the formula

“right edge of character = left edge + width”,

but in my opinion that should be

“right edge of character = left edge + width – 1″,

as a character of width 2, starting at offset 10, covers the points 10 and 11. The current version gets the first pixel of the neighboring character (or part of, depending on the resolution and scaling). On the left side, there seems to be a rounding error when calculating the texture, I added 0.4 to the offsetPoint.x value when used for the left edge corners of the texCoords array to get rid of any artifacts on the left side while still keeping the most left pixels of the character in question.

Of course, this is only visible when the bitmap font file is packed without any free space between the characters, so it probably does not show when the font is not outlined or shadowed. There might also be a better place to make the necessary changes in the code, but the above worked for me.

And BTW: Good luck in your new job!

By: mike

mike — Fri, 20 May 2011 15:45:58 +0000

Thanks guys for the kind feedback. I’m not getting the tutorials out as quickly as I would like, but they will continue.

Thanks again

Mike

By: IlyaK

IlyaK — Fri, 20 May 2011 15:33:16 +0000

Hi Mike,

You and your tutorials rock. You are an inspiration to us all. Keep up the great work!

Regards,
Ilya

By: Kai Engelhardt

Kai Engelhardt — Mon, 02 May 2011 03:59:22 +0000

Hi Mike!
I am making a game in landscape mode.
Unfortunately I am too dumb to get the Bitmap Font class to draw horizontal text.
Is that possible? If yes, can you show us how to do it (maybe it’s just a simple trick I’m missing).

Anyway : YOUR TUTORIALS ABOUT OPENGL ARE THE BEST I’VE EVER SEEN – KEEP UP THE INCREDIBLY GREAT WORK :D !

By: mike

mike — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:09:24 +0000

Hi CC

This is something I’m pulling together at the moment. There is going to be a sample app for the 71Squared engine, Cocos2d and Sparrow. As you say, this will help people get started with GD :o)

Mike