I’m making a pixel-art game and need the font to be sharp and pixel-perfect, i.e., not have anti-aliasing. I realize the standard solution is to use a bitmap font… but the game is in Japanese. Creating a raster font with 2,000+ characters is really intimidating. Is there any way to avoid this and somehow disable anti-aliasing for the regular Text object?
I know nothing about kanji, but using snowb.org, i imported an opentype kanji font and pasted in a list of joyo kanji and to my ignorant eye, that seems to be all you need to do to create a kanji bitmap…
There is no anti-aliasing on non-bitmap text objects.
Non-bitmap text objects use your operating system’s font rendering, so GDevelop itself has no control over it outside of what your OS can do.
This also means that when you show a font at a very small pixel size (such as 8px) and zoom in/scale up your game, you’re blowing up a very tiny font that is being stretched using linear scaling (by the OS, not by GDevelop) and will look off.
As mentioned above, for your scenario it truly seems that the only option is a bitmap font.
You see you have false concept of your game being pixel art actually really means just like most of us including me
Bitmap font is your best option no question about it
YET ok 2k characters is tragic to prepare so bitmap font is your best option only when it comes to visual side of things not for preparing crap side of things
Anyway back to false concept
Imagine your game is 300x200 resolution
Your objects are 8x8 size
You have your game pixelart as you want
Imagine this crazy idea
You increase resolution to 600x400 so you basically increased it 2x
Which means your objects which still are 8x8 will be 2x smaller
NOW option A
What if you would increase size of your objects from 8x8 to 16x16?
I mean they still would look same exact size in 600x400
As they would look in 300x200 at 8x8
Option B
Keep the size
Change zoom level
Increase zoom level from 1 to 2
You changed resolution from 300x200 to 600x400
And you changed zoom from 1 to 2
Now you also have exact same effect as with option A yet you did not need to resize your assets
NOW only thing you need to do is have text on layer which is NOT resized
And that can create A LOT of trouble
With option A
You will need to go trough every single asset you have upscale it
(do it per file not in game)
And re arrange them to account their new size
But then you DO NOT need to add new layer for text
Since you can change (via events) font to be bigger and you will get sharp characters as you want
With option B
You will need to jump around adjusting text to position of camera each time you display text somewhere
To account offset between different zooms
It is doable yet i can assure you that at 1st you will have problems
But once you get around it
You will be able to shove in any text anywhere in your game as you want
1st steps are always hardest to make