One thing that I want to do for my game is animate the drawing/writing of text, to give the visual effect of my game's title being hand drawn, sort of. I'm not 100% sure how I would approach this. If you need to know what I'm talking about from a visual example, check out this stackoverflow question as it gives a great example on what I'm trying to do (Javascript): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29911143/how-can-i-animate-the-drawing-of-text-on-a-web-page

So, what I am trying to do is achieve this using your run of the mill 3D API (in this case, OpenGL ES). One idea that I came up with would be to animate it using splines running along a texture somehow. Adobe Illustrator does this. To be frank, it's not the OpenGL side I can't figure out, but the overall implementation or where to begin. I already have spline code for my game as splines are heavily used in my title's art style already. After a while of googling, I haven't found any one else document how they have achieved this, as I know it has been done before.

The implementation doesn't have to be perfect, as I can improve it later on as needed. Any ideas? Thanks.

Shogun.

I would go with the simple artistic approach: draw the final result first, then make a mask (that shows the title) for each frame, progressively covering the whole title.

First suggestion that comes to mind...
For each character in your font, generate a alpha texture. Let the alpha value be essentially time. A value of 0.0f would be "draw this at frame 0 and onwards (i.e. always draw)", while a value of 0.5f would be "draw this at duration_of_character_write/2 and onwards"
When drawing, increase time per update. If it's a previously written character, just draw with the full alpha, if not, use the time alpha value as a mask.

Not sure if that makes sense or not, but I'm going to bed. Good luck =)

This is the best way. Make a timeline for each character via the alpha channel. Draw with a progressively increasing alpha-test value, uncovering parts of the lines, making them appear to be drawn in real-time.


L. Spiro

Ohhhhhhhhh, now I get it! L. Spiro's response put it into perspective that I could understand. Thanks.

Shogun.