PIXI.BitmapText font from PIXI.TextStyle

[Steve73]

Is there a way to create a BitmapText font from a PIXI.TextStyle? I would like to combine pre-installed system fonts, that don‘t require any downloads, with the performance of BitmapText.

If I use a Bitmap font consisting of a png and fnt file the download size of my app is increased by ~70kB. If I use PIXI.Text the text rendering of my app gets too slow.

[ivan.popelyshev]

No, but for pixijs v4 there is plugin that generates bitmap fonts from system fonts: https://github.com/avgjs/pixi-richtext . I'm gonna port it to v5  and make more efficient this month.

Also there are ways to make PIXI Text faster, can you tell me how do you use it?

[Steve73]

Thank you for your prompt reply! Yes, the that‘s what I‘m looking for! I think this functionality would be a really nice addition to the API. Something like:

const style = new PIXI.TextStyle({
    fontFamily: "Verdana"
});

// ### some function to convert the style into a loaded bitmap font

let bitmapText = new PIXI.BitmapText("text using a fancy font!", {font: "Verdana"});

My usecase is a mmo game with many players on the screen (can be more than 100 players). Every player has a player name shown above his player sprite). Additionally players can send short messages which are also shown above the player.

As a consequence I have hundreds of PIXI.Text objects. The creation of these objects during startup takes several seconds. But I want the game start instantly. Actually it does (thanks to PIXI’s incredible speed and minimal footprint!). Only the Text object creation takes too long.

 

 

[ivan.popelyshev]

Try Pixi-ui , it has DynamicText but lacks documentation, however @bQvle responds to people who get stucj in his code. Just spend a few hours with it.

You didnt mention do you use v4 or v5? Text-related plugins werent ported yet

[Steve73]

Thanks. Currently I‘m using v5. I don‘t really want to go back to v4.

After thinking this through, I‘m planning to use BitmapText objects and live with the increased download size until the required text-related plugins are available or I find the time to write the „TextStyle to BitmapText“ converter myself.

Thanks again for your prompt feedback! It was highly appreciated.