bitmap fonts are slow. - not exactly them - its more the fact that on a single display you can have easily 2000 characters - and sprites tend to eat your resouces when you try to have several thousand of them on screen..

can that be all? even the built in text is only 2 times faster and 10 times uglier, paste image instead of sprite is no better..
while i write this windows displays me 1000 chars in directdraw without any problem and i feel it could be much more.. so?
and games? - this morning i was sitting in front of my quake3 console .. lots of text - no cpu..

is there some magic memblock shiftig trick i missed or is it simply a dbpro limitation like the old dot slowness

btw i already found the DBP BMP Font plugin from accode (minimal faster) and several other threads / code snippets etc. but they are all working with the same sprite stuff..

any ideas / solutions / help?

The Accode plugin is fast. Much faster than the default text.

Sprites themselves are very fast. You shouldn't be using a large amount of sprites unless you've loaded a huge number of individual fonts. Are you? If you are, I recommend cutting down. Too many fonts in any presentation is bad, including a video game.

standard text 20 calls - 50 character string - 500 fps
accode text 20 calls - 50 character string - 90 fps
sprite text 1000 calls - forget it..

@WindowsKiller - how else to use them? (animated would do maybe) - but its the paste that is slowing.. and grouping words to make it faster doesnt looks like the right way..

my point is - it not good to have a console function that is eating more cpu than the program itself..

Are you UV mapping your character set ? or did you split it up into separate images ?

Ok, then.

@WindowsKiller - had similar ideas, looks like the best way..
btw. du you use the regual bitmap-to-memblock-to-image commands?
will try it
thx for all the answers

edit: the bitmap method works well - but is there a way to clear a bitmap without having to delete and recreate it? - clear not only the color (with cls etc.) but the alpha channel..

atair I've found this to make bitmap-to-membock-to-image. I'm trying to display a sentence word by word but can't seem to find fast a method of doing this, currently I'm using a bitmap, then I paste my bitmap font letters on the bitmap, get an image from the bitmap and finally texturing a plane with that image...but it's a very slow process!

thx for the tip

at the end i made it like you say, but with sprites.. combined with a 300 images buffer to reuse already converted strings.. and a buffer system to convert max. 2 images per cycle.. still slow but enough for a console..

i still thinking if there can be a shader effect that writes text just like the bitmap font - just full gpu based .. you give the gpu the master font image and then give the effect x,y,string$... just dreaming..

well I found out a very fast way of doing what I wanted! I'm pasting a letter at a time on the screen, it's very fast only need to keep the current index of a string!
By the way does anyone know how to create your own bitmap fonts from a system font?

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By the way does anyone know how to create your own bitmap fonts from a system font?

See my post on the 17th Spetember in this thread, it includes the source code for a small utility. Go Create

try this plugin ......

Batvink - Was't there a complete Article on Bitmap Fonts this newsletter?