Search code examples
windowsopenglscreensaver

Creating a 3D text screensaver

I hope I'm not asking this in the wrong place, I'm just lost and don't now where else to turn to.

My boss insists on me creating a 3D text screensaver for windows, just like the opengl one found in windows, but the text has to be longer.
In windows it's limited to 14 chars.

Does anyone know of a software which can create such a screensaver?

Solution

  • There are a few font rendering libraries out there for OpenGL, I would use GLTT because it can generate 3d extruded fonts.

    http://www.opengl.org/archives/resources/features/fontsurvey/

    Since this doesn't sound like a very important request from your boss, I'd recommend you use immediate mode OpenGL and whatever other libraries you can find to hack the screensaver together in a day or so. The general procedure for the screensaver is actually quite simple. Once you have the screensaver initialized and the 3d text generated, you just need to make a few calls to glTranslatef and glRotatef with position and rotation values that you increment every frame.