This article is just going to show you how to implement fonts into your game. The target is mostly for beginners. I will show you the easiest way(in my opinion) to do it. This tutorial will be in 16-bit Direct X and assumes that you have everything set up. It will use lpddsback as the back buffer.
[size="5"]Setting it up
First you want to make a new HFONT variable like so:
HFONT fnt;//Fill in the structure with default
// values and use the Arial Font
Fnt = CreateFont(14,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, "Arial")[size="5"]Drawing Text
Making the function to draw text using GDI is straight forward enough so I will just show you the function:
void Draw_Text(char *text, int x,int y,
COLORREF color,
LPDIRECTDRAWSURFACE lpdds,
HFONT fnt)
{
//this function draws text in 16-bit DX mode
// with the selected font
HDC dc; // the dc
// get the dc from surface
lpdds->GetDC(&dc)
// set the colors
SetTextColor(dc,color);
// set background mode to transparent
// so black isn't copied
SetBkMode(dc, TRANSPARENT);
// draw the text using the font
SelectObject(dc, fnt);
TextOut(dc,x,y,text,strlen(text));
// release the dc
lpdds->ReleaseDC(dc);
} // end Draw_Text[size="5"]Using all of this
Now I will show you an example of how to use all this to use fonts:
//First make the font
HFONT fnt;
Fnt = CreateFont(14,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,"Arial");
//Draw the text in Arial
Draw_Text("This text is in Arial at Size 14",
0,0,RGB(255, 255, 255), lpddsback, fnt);[Editor's note: Although this technique is simple and straightforward, it is also quite slow compared to other methods. For games that only have limited text output or that don't require a high degree of performance, it should work well, but for higher-end games, there are much faster techniques available.]
