Quick question, I'm getting to the point in my 2D RPG Engine where I'm ready to design the 'usual' character status screen. My Player class has members that contain all of the character information. My first though was to simply add public methods to get these values and print them on screen using DrawText. However, in surfing for existing 2D art I've noticed that there are some games that have text (particularly numbers) on bmp sprites. Is it faster to render these bmp images than using the DrawText method? (Newby DirectX question, but that's why I'm in the beginner's forum). Thanks, Dave

Depends on your app. I prefer to draw text from sprites because that way I don't have to install a font in the target system for my game to work.

Also, sometimes we have fonts that should be rendered as sprites (textured fonts). The artists would kill me if I use plain fonts.

Luck!
Guimo

I think using images is better than using TT fonts. I use a 64x64 block of a PNG file for each character, which gives you a lot of flexibility. You can use textured characters as you please, and add things like a drop shadow into the image. Make the characters white, and you can do things like:

-use additive blend to not draw the shadow (black is ignored)
-change the vertex colors to draw different colored characters
-scale and rotate characters with a lot of flexibility
-make your 'text' class an extension of whatever sprite class you use

A little more work than using system fonts but a lot more powerful in some ways. Note that I had to write a utility to measure the width of each character so the text class knows how to space the text (unless you use a fixed-width font, bleh.)