Text systems are always a bit finicky. I'm currently using a bitmap based approach, where every glyph is its own sprite and usually given a name like "fontname_065", where the last three digits are the ASCII code for the character. If you have a copy of my game Brixtar you can open up the SVG file in the resource PAK to see the sprite sheet.

Then it's a matter of writing your own typesetting code. I typically write a class to contain the string and sprites, and to put all the glyphs one after the other based on their widths. If you imagine yourself as setting letter blocks into a printing press it's easier to figure out how to the write the code [smile].

Quote:Original post by Trapper Zoid
Text systems are always a bit finicky. I'm currently using a bitmap based approach, where every glyph is its own sprite and usually given a name like "fontname_065", where the last three digits are the ASCII code for the character. If you have a copy of my game Brixtar you can open up the SVG file in the resource PAK to see the sprite sheet.

Then it's a matter of writing your own typesetting code. I typically write a class to contain the string and sprites, and to put all the glyphs one after the other based on their widths. If you imagine yourself as setting letter blocks into a printing press it's easier to figure out how to the write the code [smile].

That's exactly the approach I was thinking of. I'm just going to have a sprite for each character, iterate through a string, and draw the sprites depending on what character it is(specifically, casting the char to an integer to get its ASCII value).

I was thinking of adding some other features, for instance recognizing the newline '\n' and having the text drawn on a new line. However, I don't think I would even use that in this game.

It would be alot nicer if XNA had some sort of text rendering with TTF files, but this should be fine too.

Hey guys.

Sprite-Font support was added in the recent 1.0 "refresh" of XNA. Here's one of the functions you use to draw a string to the screen.

Hope that helps.

Thanks! That certainly makes things alot easier, and I can incorporate it into my XNA framework.