Creating a simple Text cache using texture from PIXI.Text

[bobmartin]

Hello,

I'm trying to optimise at bit my text rendering.  I render a graph, and each node in it contains an icon (from fontawesome or similar type font) and the link connecting it can display the relation name.  There is only 9 possible icons and 13 relations so it seems like a bad idea to generate 'N' PIXI.Text objects so I thought I'd try just caching the text object in a map and using its texture inside sprites then cleaning up when done.

I've ran into two problems though.

First the texture wont display unless the text is part of the scene.  If I add it as a child the Sprites will work.  If I don't they will just be empty.

Secondly, if I try to work around problem one by adding the text into the scene anyway the Sprite versions will all flicker when the text is changed (I change the text on a zoom event to scale it sharply) and not appear for a starting frame when the text is added.

Is there a way to generate the texture for a text item without adding it to the scene, and could that fix the flicker?

I forked someone elses pen to try demonstrate the text being part of the scene issue.
https://codepen.io/anon/pen/yWXMJM

I did see this project - https://github.com/JiDW/pixi-cocoontext/blob/master/src/CocoonText/index.js
But I was hoping not to have to copy all the inners of Text

Cheers
Bob

[themoonrat]

Does this help?

https://www.pixiplayground.com/#/edit/sNKLacqLJenYpsQyc6mIp

The issue you were struggling with is that Text is lazily updated. It only usally gets updated when it gets rendered; but you can force it to update with the updateText() function.

[bobmartin]

Thanks @themoonrat works perfectly.