Bitmap Fonts

Bitmap Fonts

All the graphics in Sir Lamorak’s Quest will be rendered with OpenGL. In fact, the iPhoneuses OpenGL ES , which is a subset of OpenGL for mobile devices.We cover OpenGL ES in more detail in the section,“Technology.”

Sadly, though, OpenGL ES doesn’t support the ability to render fonts to the screen. Asa result, we’ll have to use bitmap fonts.

Bitmap fonts aren’t too different from sprites and sprite sheets. In fact, we use sprites and sprite sheets to support bitmap fonts.This will be covered in Chapter 8,“Bitmap Fonts.”

Because OpenGL ES lacks font support, you’ll have to define a font as a series of images.To do this, you’ll need to create a complex sprite sheet that contains an image foreach character in the font. If we were doing this manually, it would be a real pain, but luckily, tools such as Hiero6 and bmfont7 make the process of turning a font into a sprite sheet really easy. More detail on Hiero can be found in the section, “Tools.”

AngelCode has created the bmfont tool, and it is this tool and its generated output tha tHiero has been based.Although bmfont is much more feature rich compared to Hiero, itis currently only available on the Windows platform. For this reason, I will be using the Java-based Hiero that will run on a Mac.