I've spent several frustrating hours trying to implement (what I thought would be) a simple FontActor
class.
The idea is to just draw text at a specific position using a provided BitmapFont
. That much, I've managed to accomplish. However, I'm struggling to compute my actor's width/height based on the rendered text.
(Using a FitViewport for testing)
open class FontActor<T : BitmapFont>(val font: T, var text: CharSequence = "") : GameActor() {
val layout = Pools.obtain(GlyphLayout::class.java)!!
companion object {
val identity4 = Matrix4().idt()
val distanceFieldShader: ShaderProgram = DistanceFieldFont.createDistanceFieldShader()
}
override fun draw(batch: Batch?, parentAlpha: Float) {
if (batch == null) return
batch.end()
// grab ui camera and backup current projection
val uiCamera = Game.context.inject<OrthographicCamera>()
val prevTransform = batch.transformMatrix
val prevProjection = batch.projectionMatrix
batch.transformMatrix = identity4
batch.projectionMatrix = uiCamera.combined
if (font is DistanceFieldFont) batch.shader = distanceFieldShader
// the actor has pos = x,y in local coords, but we need UI coords
// start by getting group -> stage coords (world)
val coords = Vector3(localToStageCoordinates(Vector2(0f, 0f)), 0f)
// world coordinate destination -> screen coords
stage.viewport.project(coords)
// screen coords -> font camera world coords
uiCamera.unproject(coords,
stage.viewport.screenX.toFloat(),
stage.viewport.screenY.toFloat(),
stage.viewport.screenWidth.toFloat(),
stage.viewport.screenHeight.toFloat())
// adjust position by cap height so that bottom left of text aligns with x, y
coords.y = uiCamera.viewportHeight - coords.y + font.capHeight
/// TODO: use BitmapFontCache to prevent this call on every frame and allow for offline bounds calculation
batch.begin()
layout.setText(font, text)
font.draw(batch, layout, coords.x, coords.y)
batch.end()
// viewport screen coordinates -> world coordinates
setSize((layout.width / stage.viewport.screenWidth) * stage.width,
(layout.height / stage.viewport.screenHeight) * stage.height)
// restore camera
if (font is DistanceFieldFont) batch.shader = null
batch.projectionMatrix = prevProjection
batch.transformMatrix = prevTransform
batch.begin()
}
}
And in my parent Screen
class implementation, I rescale my fonts on every window resize so that they don't become "smooshed" or stretched:
override fun resize(width: Int, height: Int) {
stage.viewport.update(width, height)
context.inject<OrthographicCamera>().setToOrtho(false, width.toFloat(), height.toFloat())
// rescale fonts
scaleX = width.toFloat() / Config.screenWidth
scaleY = height.toFloat() / Config.screenHeight
val scale = minOf(scaleX, scaleY)
gdxArrayOf<BitmapFont>().apply {
Game.assets.getAll(BitmapFont::class.java, this)
forEach { it.data.setScale(scale) }
}
gdxArrayOf<DistanceFieldFont>().apply {
Game.assets.getAll(DistanceFieldFont::class.java, this)
forEach { it.data.setScale(scale) }
}
}
This works and looks great until you resize your window.
After a resize, the fonts look fine and automatically adjust with the relative size of the window, but the FontActor
has the wrong size, because my call to setSize
is wrong.
Initial window:
After making window horizontally larger:
For example, if I then scale my window horizontally (which has no effect on the world size, because I'm using a FitViewport
), the font looks correct, just as intended. However, the layout.width
value coming back from the draw()
changes, even though the text size hasn't changed on-screen. After investigation, I realized this is due to my use of setScale
, but simply dividing the width by the x-scaling factor doesn't correct the error. And again, if I remove my setScale
calls, the numbers make sense, but the font is now squished!
Another strategy I tried was converting the width/height into screen coordinates, then using the relevant project/unproject methods to get the width and height in world coordinates. This suffers from the same issue shown in the images.
How can I fix my math?
Or, is there a smarter/easier way to implement all of this? (No, I don't want Label
, I just want a text actor.)
One problem was my scaling code. The fix was to change the camera update as follows:
context.inject<OrthographicCamera>().setToOrtho(false, stage.viewport.screenWidth.toFloat(), stage.viewport.screenHeight.toFloat())
Which causes my text camera to match the world viewport camera. I was using the entire screen for my calculations, hence the stretching.
My scaleX
/Y
calculations were wrong for the same reason. After correcting both of those miscalculations, I have a nicely scaling FontActor
with correct bounds in world coordinates.