Tinrocket, LLC is pleased to announce that the next major release of SuperSpriteSurface will contain an OpenGL based text rendering engine. This text rendering engine is implemented as a subclass to the SuperSprite class, making it easy to use & integrate into your software. Since it’s a subclass of SuperSprite, it supports rotation & scaling effects.

The text engine supports variable width fonts and font kerning for high quality text rendering. To give your text a bit of flair, the text engine will support 3 methods of coloring your text: simple color, gradient color, and full bit-mapped color.

SuperSpriteSurface will also ship with a font map creation tool, allowing developers to create SuperSpriteSurface Font Files that work & look identical cross-platform. Font Files are a combination of OpenGL texture maps and font glyph metrics data.

The Font Map Creation Tool will determine an optimal packing for the font image data, maximizing the texture space used. This tool will also allow you to export image templates to add texture or a 3d appearance to your font in an image editing program, if you so choose. When the user is done customizing the look of their font, the font creation tool will export the font images and font metrics in a single file that is easy to use within SuperSpriteSurface.

Many of the thousands of free fonts that are available on the internet are just perfect for games!

Finally, a version of the Font Map Creation Tool will also be available for purchase by developers who want to create and use font textures in their own OpenGL applications. This special version will export textures as BMP images and metrics data as CSV text files.

No release date has been set yet for the next major version of SuperSpriteSurface.

Below is a sneak peek of some early screen shots:

The Designer window of the Font Texture Creation Tool.

An Editing window from the Font Map Creation Tool. Edit the alpha & color data of your font file here or export image template for use in bit-mapped editing programs.