How does the GUI write text?

[playerdark]

Hi,
I am using an old version of Irrlicht, I think 1.2 in my project which I am working on for a few years now. The reason I haven't changed it yet is because I modified it and don't want to redo the whole modification set againand again with every Irrlicht release, so I intend to do one update to the then latest version, before I release.

One thing that is really very very bad with the irrlicht version I am using is the way text is printed in the GUI. Every letter is rendered on two triangles which slows printing of larger texts down to a level where it becomes unusable.

My question is now: Has this been fixed in the meantime? My main change to Irrlicht was the addon of hardware renderbuffer and I understand version 1.5 now offers that too so I may consider updating, but I would like to know if that text problem was also fixed. I read through the change list of the last versions but could not find anything.

thanks

[hybrid]

We have improved the text rendering a lot, but it's not using hw buffers so far, so there's still room for improvements. But it's definitely not slower than before, so it should be safe to upgrade.

[Nox]

Or you create a patch an send it to the patch tracker. Then we all could pray that, it is added to 1.6 or something like this.

[playerdark]

Basically what I'm looking for is having static text rendered to a temporary texture that is then shown on two triangles over the shape of the text. That's what I wasa fiddling with some time ago but it didnt work out because of some internal procedures in the GUI which I didn't care to explore at that time. I dont think that its necessary to have text in a hardware buffer, I use HW buffers for my meshes though, but it would be nice to see a static text or button text rendered from such a temproary texture instead of using two triangles per character. That's what I'm looking for.