LabelAtlasCreator - label atlas tool for Mac OS X

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LabelAtlasCreator - label atlas tool for Mac OS X

(12 posts) (5 voices)

Started 2 years ago by indeeo
Latest reply from katsudon

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indeeo
Member

Hi guys,

I've been reading this forum for a while now, but haven't posted much until now. With our game now finally nearing release (after many months of development), I found some time to clean up one of our internally made tools to make it useable for others. Hopefully some of you will find it helpful.

Early on in development, we created a Mac OS X native font atlas image maker. This was made before I found the other tools (like Hiero) that are now available. I think it's still a rather useful tool; fast and easy to use.

The app outputs label atlas images, as well as plist files containing font layout info, such as the glyph advance values, for each atlas created.

Also included is a LabelAtlas subclass which uses the created atlas image and plist files to create and draw strings in cocos2d. One of the neat features of the class is that it has a setting for adjusting the kerning.

You can download the app here:

http://indeeo.com/development/LabelAtlasCreator.zip

Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

Posted 2 years ago #
carolight
Member

This is very easy to use. Thank you very much!

Posted 2 years ago #
riq
Key Master

thanks @indeeo

I've just tested it and works nice. It is a good improvement for the current LabelAtlas class.

I don't know if you have played with BitmapFontAtlas, but it is similar to your ALLabelAtlas class. At the moment there are 2 editors for BitmapFontAtlas: a java editor and a win32 editor, but your editor seems to be easier to use.

The java editor (Hiero Font editor: http://slick.cokeandcode.com/demos/hiero.jnlp ) is very similar to your editor, with some additional features like: compacts the glyphs to reduce texture size, gradients, padding and other small features.

It would be great (for cocos2d and the other frameworks who supports Hiero) to have a native Mac OS X editor :-)

Posted 1 year ago #
ugol
Member

Hi, just tried with 0.99rc and ALLabelAtlas.m doesn't compile. The class should extend CCLabelAtlas instead of LabelAtlas because of renaming. I can't spot the other error, though...

-> transformAnchor_ = ccp((NSInteger)(contentSize_.width * anchorPoint_.x), (NSInteger)(contentSize_.height * anchorPoint_.y));

in setString method

transformAnchor_:undeclared

Posted 1 year ago #
indeeo
Member

@ugol - thanks for letting me know.

It looks like transformAnchor_ is no longer used in 0.9, not sure what the equivalent is.

I haven't tried using ALLabelAtlas with 0.99rc yet - we only recently finished development of our game which uses 0.8.2, so I haven't had much time to try out the new 0.9 builds.

I'll take a look soon, and hopefully post an updated version.

Posted 1 year ago #
riq
Key Master

I think that transformAnchor_ is anchorPointInPixels_

Posted 1 year ago #
ugol
Member

Ok, it compiles now. I'll post here if there are runtime issues

Posted 1 year ago #
ugol
Member

Strange, substituting the "normal" creation of a slow Label with an ALLabelAtlas and consequently a simple call to setString lowered the FPS from 60 to 40!

Posted 1 year ago #
indeeo
Member

@ugol: does this performance hit occur every time you call setString: on the ALLabelAtlas or is this only an issue at initialization?

The performance of ALLabelAtlas and LabelAtlas should be close to identical - the only difference between the two is at initialization (the first time you use a particular font description) where ALLabelAtlas loads the small plist file defining the font metric values. With any subsequent use of that same font description, all of those values will be cached.

Posted 1 year ago #
ugol
Member

@indeeo no, it's worse than this: I switched from normal Labels to ALLabelAtlas (I am prototyping, so I started with normal labels, it's a board game and not an arcade). There are around 100 hundreds sprites (board squares actually) with subsprites (the labels). So I tried to switch to Atlas sprites and observed the FPS going down instead of up. In the main loop there are only setString calls now, which in the old way were really recreating labels and thus should have been much costly.
I'll try with the BitmapFontAtlas to see if something related to your classes... the I'll go with the profiler

Posted 1 year ago #
riq
Key Master

@ugol: If you are going to use BitmapFontAtlas, please use the v0.99.0rc. It includes a bug fix regarding setString and fonts with kerning.

@indeeo: it seems that the updateAtlasValues can be optimized a little bit by placing all the objective-c message calls outside the loop.

eg: This [[textureAtlas_ texture] pixelsHigh] could be placed outside the loop.

Posted 1 year ago #
katsudon
Member

Hi all

I have been spending time to figure out changing font size or space between letters using LabelAtlasCreator, but no success...
When I change font size on LabeAtlasCreator and create png file to put sdk, it shows letters way off left or right on iphone simulator. How do you change font size and show letters properly on iphone? itemWidth and itemHeight are should be same as Glyph Dimension? Simulator shows "right" letters when itemWidth is 48 and itemHeight is 64....but there are so much spaces between each letters.... please help!

CCLabelAtlas *label1 = [CCLabelAtlas labelWithString:dateString charMapFile:@"centuryGothic3.png" itemWidth:48 itemHeight:64 startCharMap:' '];

Posted 1 year ago #

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