TextField with custom font causing lag

victor_wujitouch · July 2012

I have a textfield for my score counter and if I call setText("XXX") each frame to update the score the frame rate drops a lot if I have about 15-20 moving sprites on the screen. I also noticed in Xcode it shows these two messages whenever setText is called:

log: Inserting *unnamed* to the texture cache. Total memory is 9804 KB.
log: Deleting *unnamed* from the texture memory. Total memory is 9796 KB.

I've tried setting the text every 5 or 10 frames and that does seem to help but the score doesn't update as much as I'd like it to.

I initialize the TextField like this inside of a scene:

local font = TTFont.new("fonts/Averia-Regular.ttf", 28)
scoreLabel = TextField.new(font)
scoreLabel:setText("00")
scoreLabel:setPosition(5, scoreLabel:getHeight() + 5)
self:addChild(scoreLabel)

Then, in the game loop I set the score like this:

scoreLabel:setText(self.score)

where score is a number amount. Does anything look wrong or should be done differently?

Thanks

techdojo · July 2012

Can't give you answer on that - although as I'm doing some text heavy apps I'd be interested in knowing the results.

However - what you could do would be to just have ten basic bitmaps to represent each number and then write a simple function to take the score value and turn it into a number of sprites.

On a side note - one thing I always used to do in my games was maintain two scores, the real one that represented the actual score for things like extra life checking etc, and the displayed one. Each frame I'd work out the difference between the displayed score and real score and then add 1/8th of the difference (diff >> 3) to the displayed score (obviously making the two equal if the difference was < 8) and the convert the displayed score into sprites for rendering.

It worked really well in action / arcade games where you could get a big score bonus as you'd then see the displayed score "roll" up to the desired value rather than just jumping and added a little extra bit of polish

victor_wujitouch · July 2012

Hmm....good idea about the bitmaps and the score keeping. Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try when I get a chance.

Scouser · July 2012

I think I read somewhere (on these forums, but can't seem to find the post) that the True Type font rendering was quite a bit slower than bitmap fonts. I may have dreamed the post up but I'm sure I didn't. I also think the post was by @atilim. Maybe you could create a bitmap font and use that instead.

techdojo · July 2012

In theory it should only be slower at the point you actually create the font and the page of glyphs is generated, then arguably it should be the same speed as a bitmap font - depending on the image depth it might even be faster as the font texture could be a lot smaller (if for instance an 8 bit texture was used).

gaboritaly · July 2012

@Scouser maybe I found that article, I was looking for that for long time...
http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/4915#Comment_4915

Scouser · July 2012

@gaboritaly: yeah, that's the one.

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