Tag: ttf

SDL-TTF now on Raspberry Pi

SDL-TTF now on Raspberry Pi

Posted on by David

Raspberry Pi screenshotI eventually got the Windows SDL vs TTF comparison program converted to run on Raspberry-pi, after wrestling with VS Code’s Folder. Get it wrong and you can waste hours trying to get it to compile and link. I originally set the Folder (VS Code’s way of managing projects) to the pi/Projects folder (which contained both asteroids and sdlttf folders) but eventually I sussed it and set sdlttf as my Folder.  The login user is pi and so the pi folder is my home folder. I created the Projects folder under it.

This time the home brewed print routine (print) took 28x as long as the SDL_ttf compared to 14x on Windows. I used the same text.png and font.ttf files. The times are in the Window caption and read (for those with poor contrast) sdl: 35538.574 ttf: 1235.630. These times are the microsecond times to draw the strings 100x.

Changes were fairly minimal. I changed the fopen_s to fopen (used for error logging)  and changed the paths to the two font files. The other change was in the timing which used the Linux versions of hr_time.h/.c and called the diff() function instead of GetElapsedTime().

I’ve zipped up the source file (sdlttf.c) plus timing files and JSON config files for VS Code in the sdlttf_pi.zip file and put it in the LearnConLinux repository on GitHub.

Note I created a projects folder then sdlttf under that. The paths in tasks.json reflect this. To build this you’ll need libsdl2-dev,libsdl2_image_dev and libsdl2-ttf-dev installed. I used clang version 7 (the default installed on pi when you do sudo apt install clang) but I imagine gcc should also build it without any problems.

This matches my conclusions from running the virtually identical Windows version. The sdlttf way is way faster for prerendered strings than my print routine which just blits the characters out of the font bitmap one by one.

 

How slow is SDL_TTF 2.0?

How slow is SDL_TTF 2.0?

Posted on by David

FWhen  I created the Asteroids game, I deliberately didn’t use SDL_TTF instead I took a Monospaced font and saved it out as a PNG file which was loaded into a SDL Texture. I then created my own character printing routines by figuring out which character I wanted and then blitting it. The image shows the font I used zoomed in.

You probably can’t get much faster than that, although I wasn’t really doing that much output. Every frame, the score is output and if an asteroid is hit, the value of the hit scrolls upward for a few frames.

Also when you lost a life, it would print using a scaled up version of the font. The only problem with that is scaling up a bit map font just shows off the deficiencies of the font scaling as a bitmap, as the image shows. Not exactly smooth is it?

So I’ve decided to write a small program that uses SDL_TTF 2.0 and does high resolution timing to determine exactly how long it takes to draw text using a TTF font. The big advantage of doing that in a game is you can draw different sizes, weight (bold etc) and colour compared to a bitmap font.

But TTF is an interesting format, there’s a lot going on. Letters are drawn using mathematical equations so it is bound to be a bit slower than pure blitting and I’m interested in knowing just how long it takes. It’s all relative, if you view a page of text in MS Word (or just in Windows generally), Windows renders it pretty fast.  But its still important to know just how fast. For what I used text for in Asteroids, it probably could have used TTF text but in another game with more text it might be too slow for 60 frames per second.

If it was too slow then perhaps a hybrid approach might work. Figure out what text you’ll need, prerender it into bitmaps (when the program starts up) then use those bitmaps.

So I’ll publish the speed test program once written. Watch this space.