How is Text exported from Blender to BGE?

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

How is text drawn in BGE? How does Blender export Text into BGE (given that it’s a type of curve).

Are there specific places in the source I can look at?

2

BGE rasterizes it to a texture and then displays a bunch of planes. The resolition can be adjusted and is in units of 100px/bu. The texture is regenerated if the object is scaled.

3

Interesting. It’s definitely a texture during runtime.

Out of curiosity I just gave a text object a scaling action and ran it in the bge… blender almost immediately crashed, and I could definitely see it trying to create a new texture each frame from smaller chunks. (I wouldn’t advise trying to replicate it, I couldn’t even move my mouse for a good minute.)

How difficult would it be to keep text as a vector? It seems extraneous for the game engine to go back and forth between vector curves and textures.

4

Ahh, that’s close to what I thought.

Do you know where in the code this happens? Do you know if it’s possible for me to use the rasterizer separately?

5

Uh, I did a grep for it through the game engine source a month or so ago, but can’t remember where I ended up. You could possibly work backwards from the python interface which is in blender/source/gameengine/Kestji/KX_FontObject.cpp

6

Hmm, I spent some time looking, I couldn’t find the exact place where the export happens.

I started in KX_FontObject, I tried looking in DrawFont2D for a hint of where the data was being taken from, but that didn’t really lead me anymore. I spent some time looking at the BLF_api stuff, but didn’t find anything significant there either.

7

check this out.

make a object that is a bunch of faces
assign them to a

dictionary= { str(index) = [4 vertex] }

and in the ge, to make text, you move faces around and scale them, and set the uv?

so all text, even multiple font, get rendered to a font atlas and mapped?

‘Letter_font’:[4 uv cord]

example

‘a_bfont’ = [uv for bfont letter a lowercase]

this way all text in a scene could be 1 object eh?

so we automate this process behind the scenes, and uage it replace the text object eventually?

8

Hey BPR, I’m understanding your idea, would you mind going into more detail?

What I want to know, basically, is if I can use the same exporter for text in BGE for another game engine, specifically, BDX.