Suggestion : Official Sprite Font Plugin

I exported from r133 and everything's working fine. I have couple of Android devices and it works perfectly on those. I can't say anything about iOS because I don't have and iPhone.

I do have quite old version of the plugin so maybe thats why it's working for me.

The only problems I get is with physics. My game started crashing after the update.

What do Japanese games do with regards to spritefonts? I have no idea, but I would guess they just pre-render text to images, since spritefonts don't work for that language.For the american market, they use prerendered characters' sprites:

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23009908/construct_forum_uploads/5876%5B1%5D.png" border="0" />

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23009908/construct_forum_uploads/6063%5B1%5D.png" border="0" />

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23009908/construct_forum_uploads/6072%5B1%5D.png" border="0" />

nemo Perhaps. It seems to work if you run a layout but not the whole project.

Ashley It would seem they use bitmap fonts for japanese the same way. There are hundreds of retro games with bitmap font dialogue in numerous languages.

Nice found California,

here's the one from Bomberman with japanese letter

<img src="http://i43.tinypic.com/6iaf48.png" border="0" />

If you're going for a full on Sprit Font plugin, and not a tilemap plugin with font tiles, then you also should support variable width sprite letters as well.

However I personally believe that a tilemap plugin with character mapping capabilities should come first. The current spritefont pluging kind of does that, through a string, and aligning Nth character with Nth tile (based on tile size and image zie). The characters in the string are all unicode so you can assign any letter to anything (as long as you make the tile).

I'm not trying to usurp the thread for tilemaps entirely, but static-width spritefonts are just custom tilemaps in their own right and have a larger overarching reason to be implimented (thus more reason to impliment spritefont tile assignment)

Spritefonts can be artistically modified more than a regular font/webfont could be. Since font creation tools have no central Game-Maker hub for people who would need to make one, it's easier to make your own graphical font via illustrator or photoshop as you can guarantee the outcome rather than looking through 1000 fonts and still being confused and unable to find out how to make one of your own. (Font making is pretty niche, as most people don't give it much thought)

However if you're going to need a basic font, not a graphically enhanced on, I do recommend FontStruct and Font2Web (Fontsquirrel still has issues with FontStruct). As with creating any font, you would have to create support for whatever unicode characters you will use (All fonts don't have all characters so even random webfonts may be incomplete, all the more reason to make your own webfont/spritefont)

How do spritefonts work for unicode text?

My main issue is if we only support the typical 256-character ASCII set, we're effectively cutting out lots of non-european languages like Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. So far AFAIK all the official plugins and features in the whole of Construct 2 work equally well for all users due to the unicode support throughout. I would hesitate to add a conspicuously ASCII-only feature, especially if it would take lots of work to implement. I prefer web fonts because they don't have this problem and can work with the full range of unicode characters (providing the font supports it, but at least it's possible).

What do Japanese games do with regards to spritefonts? I have no idea, but I would guess they just pre-render text to images, since spritefonts don't work for that language.

Ashley

It's same to webfonts, some font don't support non-european characters like chinese, russian, etc. There a fallback if a font doesn't support, it would go to Arial or some full language font.

Also the text can be blurry in BB10, then spritefont doesn't.

Spritefont actually supports any kind of language depends on implementation. I believe spritefont is the best to design own fonts with styles such like textures, outlines, .

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/rq7yCYA.png" border="0" />

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/AQelAxU.png" border="0" />

Bitmap fonts are part of videogame culture.

Everyone loves spritefont, why are you just denying?

For creating a sprite font without a plugin check out the very simple solution in this thread by immigrantsheep:

http://www.scirra.com/forum/sprite-text-to-follow-another-sprite_topic68878_post423261.html

He came up with the start of something pretty decent.

Roj0hound's solution works fine, too bad it doesn't show them in realtime.

R0j0hound's solution affects performance (low FPS on mobiles), this plugin doesn't affect performance.

It would be great if an official sprite font could work like the XNA Sprite Font (purple colored fixed width spaces in between each symbols / letters). This allows each font to be whatever width you want, and they will sit nicely next to one another, unlike monospaced.

Examples: dudesknight.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/xna-custom-sprite-fonts

BTW, This tool makes it really simple to create the fonts, and it exports to XNA, but sadly not monospaced font. Awesome stuff though. Very powerful. I have just been taking the generated sheet into GIMPShop and creating the monospaced sheets myself.

nubik.com/SpriteFont

For creating a sprite font without a plugin check out the very simple solution in this thread by immigrantsheep:

http://www.scirra.com/forum/sprite-text-to-follow-another-sprite_topic68878_post423261.html

He came up with the start of something pretty decent.

This way is not a good choose.In this way will creat many instances in the layout.It cause low performance on the mobile. I test on iphone 4s with cocoonjs. It lose 5-8FPS when redrawn.

I'd just like to post my support for such an extension, it would be great.

I said it was a start, don't test that capx as is, he is erasing and redrawing all the sprites every tick.

But yes it would not only put a lot of sprites on screen, but many overlapping areas of transparency.

You guys keep adding arguments for it like it would some how show up in the next release and solve all your problems.

Even if Ashley were to agree to make a plug it would just get added to the magical "todo" list, and even then who knows when it would get implemented.

Again, wouldn't fixing the existing plug make more sense?

R0j0hound's solution affects performance (low FPS on mobiles), this plugin doesn't affect performance.axr@Joannesalfa thanks for the info man, I wasn't aware of that.