Draw text in OpenGL ES

Question

I m currently developing a small OpenGL game for the Android platform and I wonder if there s an easy way to render text on top of the rendered frame  like a HUD with the player  s score etc   The text would need to use a custom font also   I ve seen an example using a View as an overlay  but I don t know if I want to do that since I might want to port the game to other platforms later   Any ideas

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I ve written a tutorial that expands on the answer posted by JVitela  Basically  it uses the same idea  but instead of rendering each string to a texture  it renders all characters from a font file to a texture and uses that to allow for full dynamic text rendering with no further slowdowns  once the initialization is complete    The main advantage of my method  compared to the various font atlas generators  is that you can ship small font files   ttf  otf  with your project instead of having to ship large bitmaps for every font variation and size  It can generate perfect quality fonts at any resolution using only a font file     The tutorial includes full code that can be used in any project

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Rendering text to a texture is simpler than what the Sprite Text demo make it looks like  the basic idea is to use the Canvas class to render to a Bitmap and then pass the Bitmap to an OpenGL texture      Create an empty  mutable bitmap Bitmap bitmap   Bitmap createBitmap 256  256  Bitmap Config ARGB 4444      get a canvas to paint over the bitmap Canvas canvas   new Canvas bitmap   bitmap eraseColor 0       get a background image from resources    note the image format must match the bitmap format Drawable background   context getResources   getDrawable R drawable background   background setBounds 0  0  256  256   background draw canvas      draw the background to our bitmap     Draw the text Paint textPaint   new Paint    textPaint setTextSize 32   textPaint setAntiAlias true   textPaint setARGB 0xff  0x00  0x00  0x00      draw the text centered canvas drawText  Hello World   16 112  textPaint      Generate one texture pointer    gl glGenTextures 1  textures  0        and bind it to our array gl glBindTexture GL10 GL TEXTURE 2D  textures 0       Create Nearest Filtered Texture gl glTexParameterf GL10 GL TEXTURE 2D  GL10 GL TEXTURE MIN FILTER  GL10 GL NEAREST   gl glTexParameterf GL10 GL TEXTURE 2D  GL10 GL TEXTURE MAG FILTER  GL10 GL LINEAR      Different possible texture parameters  e g  GL10 GL CLAMP TO EDGE gl glTexParameterf GL10 GL TEXTURE 2D  GL10 GL TEXTURE WRAP S  GL10 GL REPEAT   gl glTexParameterf GL10 GL TEXTURE 2D  GL10 GL TEXTURE WRAP T  GL10 GL REPEAT      Use the Android GLUtils to specify a two-dimensional texture image from our bitmap GLUtils texImage2D GL10 GL TEXTURE 2D  0  bitmap  0      Clean up bitmap recycle

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Look at the  Sprite Text  sample in the GLSurfaceView samples

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According to this link   http   code neenbedankt com how-to-render-an-android-view-to-a-bitmap  You can render any View to a bitmap   It s probably worth assuming that you can layout a view as you require  including text  images etc   and then render it to a Bitmap   Using JVitela s code above you should be able to use that Bitmap as an OpenGL texture

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I looked at the sprite text example and it looks awfully complicated for such a task  I considered rendering to a texture too  but I m worried about the performance hit that might cause  I might just have to go with a view instead and worry about porting when it s time to cross that bridge

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For static text    Generate an image with all words used on your PC  For example with GIMP   Load this as a texture and use it as material for a plane    For long text that needs to be updated once in a while    Let android draw on a bitmap canvas  JVitela s solution   Load this as material for a plane  Use different texture coordinates for each word    For a number  formatted 00 0     Generate an image with all numbers and a dot  Load this as material for a plane  Use below shader  In your onDraw event only update the value variable sent to the shader   precision highp float  precision highp sampler2D   uniform float uTime  uniform float uValue  uniform vec3 iResolution   varying vec4 v Color  varying vec2 vTextureCoord  uniform sampler2D s texture   void main      vec4 fragColor   vec4 1 0  0 5  0 2  0 5   vec2 uv   vTextureCoord   float devisor   10 75  float digit  float i  float uCol  float uRow   if  uv y  lt  0 45        if  uv x  gt  0 75            digit   floor uValue 10 0           digit   digit - floor digit 10 0  10 0          i   48 0 - 32 0   digit          uRow   floor i   10 0           uCol   i - 10 0   uRow          fragColor   texture2D  s texture  uv   devisor   2 0   vec2  uCol-1 5    devisor  uRow   devisor           else if  uv x  gt  0 5            uCol   4 0          uRow   1 0          fragColor   texture2D  s texture  uv   devisor   2 0   vec2  uCol-1 0    devisor  uRow   devisor           else if  uv x  gt  0 25            digit   floor uValue           digit   digit - floor digit 10 0  10 0          i   48 0 - 32 0   digit          uRow   floor i   10 0           uCol   i - 10 0   uRow          fragColor   texture2D  s texture  uv   devisor   2 0   vec2  uCol-0 5    devisor  uRow   devisor           else if  uValue  gt   10 0            digit   floor uValue 10 0           digit   digit - floor digit 10 0  10 0          i   48 0 - 32 0   digit          uRow   floor i   10 0           uCol   i - 10 0   uRow          fragColor   texture2D  s texture  uv   devisor   2 0   vec2  uCol-0 0    devisor  uRow   devisor           else           fragColor   vec4 0 0  0 0  0 0  0 0           else       fragColor   vec4 0 0  0 0  0 0  0 0     gl FragColor   fragColor        Above code works for a texture atlas where numbers start from 0 at the 7th column of the 2nd row of the font atlas  texture    Refer to https   www shadertoy com view Xl23Dw for demonstration  with wrong texture though

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IMHO there are three reasons to use OpenGL ES in a game     Avoid differences between mobile platforms by using an open standard  To have more control of the render process  To benefit from GPU parallel processing    Drawing text is always a problem in game design  because you are drawing things  so you cannot have the look and feel of a common activity  with widgets and so on   You can use a framework to generate Bitmap fonts from TrueType fonts and render them  All the frameworks I ve seen operate the same way  generate the vertex and texture coordinates for the text in draw time  This is not the most efficient use of OpenGL   The best way is to allocate remote buffers  vertex buffer objects - VBOs  for the vertices and textures early in code  avoiding the lazy memory transfer operations in draw time   Keep in mind that game players don t like to read text  so you won t write a long dynamically generated text  For labels  you can use static textures  leaving dynamic text for time and score  and both are numeric with a few characters long   So  my solution is simple     Create texture for common labels and warnings   Create texture for numbers 0-9            and  -   One texture for each character  Generate remote VBOs for all positions in the screen  I can render static or dynamic text in that positions  but the VBOs are static  Generate just one Texture VBO  as text is always rendered one way  In draw time  I render the static text   For dynamic text  I can peek at the position VBO  get the character texture and draw it  a character at a time    Draw operations are fast  if you use remote static buffers   I create an XML file with screen positions  based on screen s diagonal percentage  and textures  static and characters   and then I load this XML before rendering   To get a high FPS rate  you should avoid generating VBOs at draw time

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Take a look at CBFG and the Android port of the loading rendering code  You should be able to drop the code into your project and use it straight away   CBFG - http   www codehead co uk cbfg  Android loader - http   www codehead co uk cbfg TexFont java

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I have been looking for this for a few hours  this was the first article i came accross and although it has the best answer  the most popular answers i think are off the mark  Certainly for what i needed  weichsel s and shakazed s answers were right on the button but a bit obscured in the articles  To put you right to the project  Here  Just create a new Android project based on existing sample  Choose ApiDemos   Look under the source folder  ApiDemos src com example android apis graphics spritetext  And you will find everything you need

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In the OpenGL ES 2 0 3 0 you can also combining OGL View and Android s UI-elements   public class GameActivity extends AppCompatActivity       private SurfaceView surfaceView       Override     protected void onCreate Bundle state             setContentView R layout activity gl           surfaceView   findViewById R id oglView           surfaceView init this getApplicationContext                           public class SurfaceView extends GLSurfaceView       private SceneRenderer renderer      public SurfaceView Context context            super context              public SurfaceView Context context  AttributeSet attributes            super context  attributes              public void init Context context            renderer   new SceneRenderer context           setRenderer renderer                         Create layout activity gl xml    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  utf-8   gt       lt androidx constraintlayout widget ConstraintLayout         tools context   activities GameActivity  gt       lt com app SurfaceView         android id    id oglView          android layout width  match parent          android layout height  match parent   gt       lt TextView       gt       lt TextView       gt       lt TextView       gt   lt  androidx constraintlayout widget ConstraintLayout gt    To update elements from the render thread  can use Handler Looper

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If you insist on using GL  you could render the text on to textures  Assuming that most of the HUD is relatively static  you shouldn t have to load the textures to texture memory too often

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The Android SDK doesn t come with any easy way to draw text on OpenGL views  Leaving you with the following options    Place a TextView over your SurfaceView  This is slow and bad  but the most direct approach  Render common strings to textures  and simply draw those textures  This is by far the simplest and fastest  but the least flexible  Roll-your-own text rendering code based on a sprite  Probably second best choice if 2 isn t an option  A good way to get your feet wet but note that while it seems simple  and basic features are   it get s harder and more challenging as you add more features  texture-alignment  dealing with line-breaks  variable-width fonts etc   - if you take this route  make it as simple as you can get away with  Use an off-the-shelf open-source library  There are a few around if you hunt on Google  the tricky bit is getting them integrated and running  But at least  once you do that  you ll have all the flexibility and maturity they provide

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Take a look at CBFG and the Android port of the loading rendering code  You should be able to drop the code into your project and use it straight away    CBFG Android loader   I have problems with this implementation  It displays only one character  when I try do change size of the font s bitmap  I need special letters  whole draw fails

[android] Draw text in OpenGL ES

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