Latest Glyph Designer Screen Shots
Tonight I’ve been working on stabilising Glyph Designer and adding features such as inner shadows, gradient outlines and the preview panel. They are all pretty much finished now and looking great, so I thought I step away from the code for a moment and put up a couple of screen shots.
The first shot shows the texture atlas view with a font that has been edited using only the effects available within Glyph Designer.
Glyph Designer Texture Atlas
The second shot shows the preview panel. This allows you to type in any text you wish and see how it would be rendered when using the Cocos2D or 71Squared bitmap font classes. You can also continue to edit your font from this view as well. I think this is going to be really useful and let you see the text you are going to use in your app in Glyph Designer, before you export and try it in your app.
Glyph Designer Preview Panel
You’ll also notice that we’ve added a font list panel on the left of the GUI that shows the system font names using the actual fonts themselves. This is handy to see the fonts you already have rather than try to remember what they look like. You still have full access to the font panel as well.
Saving and loading are almost finished and when saving, your font is encoded into the project file that is produced. This means that if you load a font in to use, rather than take a system one, it is automatically loaded back up when you open your project.
Loading fonts is another feature that’s been added so that you don’t have to clog up your system with a bunch of fonts just to use them in Glyph Designer.
So, we are on track to get this finished really soon and we can then get it submitted to the App store, hopefully getting it approved by the 6th Jan, but we will have to see how that goes. If it’s not the 6th then it will be as close as we can make it.
Hope you like the screen shots and interested to hear of features you would like to see added to Glyph Designer going forward.
Mike & Tom
26 Comments
Alfred on December 23rd, 2010
Hi Everyone,
I have a little problem with the ParticleEmitter class. I cant get the right fire effect like in the Candle example in the Particle designer. I think the problem comes when trying blending in the ParticleEmitter render method. I the Candel .pex file the Source is GL_SOURCE_ALPHA and Destination GL_ONE but if I write: glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE);
nothing is rendered.
Anybody?
Thank you.
Congrats on this site and 1 question, is the Glyph designer available yet?
mike on December 23rd, 2010
Hi Alfred, have you got a screen shot of what is happening you can share?
If your using the latest ParticleEmitter class then is should be setting the blending automatically based on what is in the PEX file, so no need to change this manually in your code.
Mike
mike on December 23rd, 2010
…forgot to say, Glyph Designer is not available yet. We’re working hard to get it done ASAP :o)
Mike
ZeCreator on December 23rd, 2010
Mike,
Its the best tools for Atlas-Font i ever see ! Really ALL is nice and very well designed ! its FANTASTIC ! i want to test it at soon you can :p
its sure, i use it for include BitmapFont in my app.
thank again for this wonderful job !
Merry Christmass at ALL !
ZeC.
Alfred on December 27th, 2010
Hi Mike, thanks for your replay
I worked it out. My first scene of the game is in the snow,not a good place for blending it seems, hehe. Blending on white background doesnt work, didnt know that. Also it seems it has sth to do with rendering after the [sharedImageRenderManager renderImages]; but anyway its workiing properly now.
Thanks
Morten on December 28th, 2010
Remember to allow for international characters!
Looking forward to the app!
/morten
RogerDoger on December 30th, 2010
I use Windows tool called BMFont to make font as it writes out this exact format. One of the things I use a lot in that tool is the ability to select just the characters I want to use, rather than the whole font. Is this going to be a feature of Glyph Designer? If not, I highly encourage you to add it. Some fonts contain 1000s of characters that are not needed in an App and would waste texture space. This goes hand-in-hand with a suggestion from above to make sure it deals with international characters.
Looking forward to it.
Do you plan on making it available in any other way than the new Mac App store? I have to say, I am not a big fan of the App store for the Mac. It’s heading down a dangerous road.
mike on December 30th, 2010
Hi RogerDoger
Thanks for the comment. Glyph Designer is indeed going to let you provide the characters you want from a font. It’s not going to have the font selection grid which I believe BMFont has, but it will have a textfield in which you simply type or cut and paste the characters you want to use. These could be both Roman and non-roman fonts.
To start off with we are going to be providing this through the app store. It can take a lot of time and effort creating and maintaining a payment system and store front as we have found with Particle Designer. That said, if we find that the app store is not working for us then we will start to provide it directly.
I know there are a number of concerns about the app store, but we’re going to give it a go and see how things go, but interested in your concerns?
Mike
Mic on December 31st, 2010
Hi Mike,
Do you have a price point decided for Glyph Designer yet?
I’m kinda hoping it’ll cost around the same as Particle Designer, of which I’m already a proud owner :]
And on a side note, I couldn’t disagree more with RogerDoger – I think the Mac App Store is going to be huge and I’m really looking forward to its launch on the 6th!
-Mic
mike on December 31st, 2010
Hi Mic
Great question and this is something Tom and I have spent a long time discussing.
The short answer is that the price will be higher than Particle Designer. There’s a bunch of reasons why we have decided to increase the price, including the fact that selling through the App store will see Apple taking 30%.
The price of GD on the app store is going to be $29.99. We are obviously conscious that this is higher than PD, but it will ensure we can spend the time needed to keep it updated and as professional as we can make it plus reflect the effort that’s both gone into creating the app, as well as the effort the app will save developers using GD.
We will also be increasing the price of PD when we release version 1.3. This will have no effect on those who have already purchased PD as it will just come through as an update. We are not putting PD on the app store straight away as we already have a large user base that we are supporting directly. We will review this later and see if it’s worth doing both.
I’m sure this is going to bad news for some of our potential users, but we hope they understand that we didn’t take this decision lightly and that having a well funded tools market will hopefully mean more developers will spend time creating new innovative tools for everyone to use, which will benefit us all :o)
I hope that helps and that your not going to be too disappointed and thanks for already being a PD customer :o)
Mike & Tom
CC on January 4th, 2011
Just wanted to say that $30 sounds about right for the functionality of Glyph Designer. Obviously, we’d all love it to be cheaper, but I think it’s a reasonable asking price that shouldn’t turn away anyone but the most miserly and masochistic of developers. Thanks for pricing it within reach of hobbyist developers – you’ve got a guaranteed sale from me.
headkaze on January 5th, 2011
Please be sure it supports AngelCode’s Bitmap Font Generator output format.
mike on January 5th, 2011
Hi headkaze, completely agree. The output from Glyph Designer has been built completely around the AngelCode FNT file format. It’s been/being tested against my own classes that use AngelCode fnt files and also Cocos2D and the CCLabelBMFont class.
So far it’s been working great :o)
Mike
mike on January 5th, 2011
Hi Mic
Unfortunately not, beta testing found alignment problems with the generated glyph data which turned out to be a nightmare to track down. It’s fixed now but while digging through the render code we decided to add optimisations we were going to add later. Generating the glyphs is now multithreaded which gives us MUCH better performance when rendering glyphs after changing a font, font size, inner shadow, outer shadow or color etc.
It’s delayed things a little, but I feel it’s going to provide a better user experience. I decided I’d rather put out a v1.0 I’m pleased with rather than rush for the 6th Jan.
Apologies for the delay, but we are not far from submitting now :o)
Mike
Anonymous on January 6th, 2011
Really looking forward to this one.
Thomas on January 6th, 2011
Really looking forward to this one.
rohn on January 10th, 2011
back when I first heard about this coming tool I immediately delayed font work in our app… this weekend though it became hard to continue to excuse my reluctance to plod on through using Hiero.
Nope, I’m back to delaying and waiting for this app.
mike on January 10th, 2011
Thanks for your patience rohn. I was hoping to get it submitted to the app store last night, but some of the polish was not finished and I really didn’t want to push it out rushed at the last minute, so tonight is the new target for getting it submitted.
I’ll be posting to update everyone on it’s status and progress etc.
Mike
RogerDoger on January 11th, 2011
Count me as one of the people eagerly awaiting Glyph Designer! I’m tired of booting into windows just to use BMFont. Hiero won’t render several of the fonts I need. They just show up as arial.
lano78 on January 12th, 2011
I hope it’ll be approved soon, I know you guys will deliver an outstanding product as always.
Did you implement 3d features such as bevel/extrude?
RogerDoger on January 15th, 2011
Any updates on when Glyph Designer will be available? The worlds waits with bated breath! (or at least I do)
mike on January 15th, 2011
Hi RogerDoger, funny you should ask :o)
It’s currently 00:50 and myself and Tom have just finished doing a cleanup run through Glyph Designer. There are just a few small outstanding items to finish now, so the app WILL be posted to the app store on Sunday.
After that I’m hoping that it’s going to be quickly reviewed, fingers crossed and then available :o)
We can’t wait to get it out and into peoples hands.
Sunday I’ll be doing a video to show it off just to let people see how it looks. There have been a number of GUI changes and we are on our 3rd version of the render engine, but this one we are happy with :o)
Mike
ZeCreator on January 15th, 2011
WoOT ! Nice job Mike & Tom, now i’m sure Glyphs designer will be the best Atlas-Font tools app for the mac ! YOU made it !
Thomas (ZeC)
nexus6 on February 16th, 2011
Just purchased GD, really nice job mike. Well worth the money. I huge improvement over using heiro.
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