Search code examples
androidlibgdx

Libgdx - Font that is smotth uses mega RAM

I have a viewport (360x640), but if I render fonts on that they are ugly. So I made higher size's and downscaled them. But now they go disoriented. (size == 30)

I made a 4x bigger viewport then so I didn't need to downscale them. But now my game instead of taking 15mb ram takes up 50mb. (size == 120)

And this is not acceptable. That my textures take 30x less ram than shitty 3 TTFs.

Solution

  • See https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Coordinate-systems#world-coordinates. Use 2 viewports:

    • One which is near pixel perfect (around the same as the screen resolution of your reference target device), which you use only for the GUI like labels, buttons, etc.
    • And one which fits your game logic best (although 360x640 gives the impression you are using banana units (imaginary pixels), which you shouldn't do) and you only for rendering game objects and such.

    Either way, the size of your assets (either on disk, in RAM or in VRAM) are not in any way related to the size of your viewport: when you change the size of your viewport then you should not scale your assets. The size of your assets should be around the same size as they are when they are projected on the screen. So it doesn't matter whether you use a viewport of 3 by 5 meters or a viewport 1440 by 2560 bananas. What matters is the size in pixels on the actual screen (e.g. take a screenshot and measure it). The size of the assets should be around that same size for best results.

    If that means that you need a very large font, e.g. because you use a reference target device with a very high resolution (e.g. Retina Display), then that's how it is. You could work around that in several ways, e.g. by rendering to a smaller FBO, using texture filtering, etc. But reality is that devices with such large resolutions are equipped with at least enough memory to hold the assets for such resolution. So, in that case using more memory isn't really an issue.

    If you like to target multiple resolutions which have different restrictions on the asset size then you can use multiple assets sets. For example by using ResolutionFileHandleResolver.

    Although not related to your question, note that BitmapFont by default assumes a near pixel perfect projection and therefor uses integer positions to prevent aliasing. If you really don't want use a near pixel perfect projection then you disable that using the BitmapFont#setUseIntegerPositions method.