fonts

Fonts are a thing i need in almost every game made. So why is it important to keep them fast. Because they slow down the whole rendering if you do not know what to do with them.

First off there are 2 options. Use of ttf fonts when not rendered into a texture is slow. One letter is made of polygon which are triangles in fact, rendered each time on screen. Try to make roguelike with this kind of font and you will have 70x40 letters each draw and measure the framerate. You can easily change the size of font but it will not make the game go faster. On more better CPU it maybe runs well but think that these games run before that time on very slow computers just using a single canvas into which the letter were rendered and it was fast. New ways of making the computers fast let the programmers forget about things and then they do worst decisions and step away from the old code of it must work even on a 10 year old machine.

Then the better option is to use bitmap font. Which will also look nice on screen even with antialising on. But the size of font is a thing that will not change, until you make that font bigger as texture and then use it from there. You can use some web apps online to render a font into a texture png and then in your engine use it.