A while ago I talked about the font rendering used by Rival Fortress.

This past week I added more functionality to the text rendering subsystem in the form of better text formatting and Complex Text Layout.

Rival Fortress won’t need a complex text rendering engine, but it will require the ability to add formatting and styling.

Text formatting

The formatting needs of the engine are basic horizontal and vertical alignments, wrapping and scrolling within a parent container.

These are thing that most game developers give for granted, as they are built in every major off the shelf game engine, but when you are rolling your own tech you need to wrestle with implementation details.

I’m still working on interactive text similar to text links in World of Warcraft:

Interactive text is useful when you want the user to drill down on a particular topic or game mechanic, either by showing a tooltip or by opening a related user interface element.

I’ve also started working on support for CJK and Bi-directional text.