   wglUseFontBitmaps concerns
  Hi there,i''ve built this nice hud for a prospective game, but have found a huge hit in FPS on rendering my text.  Not even a lot of text.  I use a truetype font, built via the command wglUseFontBitmaps via CreateFont.  Without the text, my program runs at 550+ FPS, and goes to 300 with this minimal text onscreen.  To render the text, I''m going to ortho mode ( opengl ), doing a glRasterPos2f, then glCallLists for the string.  I have seen this in several tutorials, so I''m quite surprised to get such bad behaviour from it!  I know that display lists are best used for large amounts of instructions.  In this case, it''s presumably just drawing a single texture to the screen, therefore is it invoking unhelpful overhead for every character?  I do want TT fonts, at this point, so that it looks good.  Any ideas about this?  I''m not sure what to do, apart from make my own font from a custom texture to solve this.  Thanks, all. 
  300 FPS is too slow for you?   "Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke ;  lol, yeah, its relative   It ain''t much of a game yet, see, I have a vrml_1 loader, a nice batwing model, which can so far run around and fire rockets.  Text and conversations are something I really want to implement.  Without models, I get nearly 1000 FPS.  With model, I get 550 FPS.  With text I get 300.  I''d like the HUD to be as lightweight as possible, and it seems like an excessive hit in context.  Nothing is optimized - I can understand the model + rockets eating up cycles, but not a little text. ;  You might try wglUseFontOutlines; it may be faster on your hardware, especially if you''re drawing a large font size.   "Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke ;  hi Sneftel, thanks for the idea.  I''m trying to get it working right now ( outline fonts ).  One question ~ NeHe uses the command SelectObject(g_hDC, font); in his code.  What is that for?  It does not seem necessary for Bitmap fonts ( I didn''t need it anway ). ;  It isn''t completely necessary for either, but you''ll probably use it. That basically sets the current font, which is then used by wglUseFontOutlines/Bitmaps. If you don''t do this, whatever font was set last, usually the system font, will be used.   "Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke ;  alright, been working on this a while now, and need a little help.  Firstly, using the wglUseFontOutlines, I found that calling it seemd to implicitly reverse the FrontFace winding, so I had to set it manually after the call.  Secondly, there is no problem displaying text in the perspective transform, but when I go to Ortho, I either get no text or a black screen.  I''ve got a test polygon in the Ortho mode, proving I''m drawing in the right place, but the text refuses to work.  I have to do this in Ortho, so is there something I''m missing? ;  aha ~  clicky.Quote : "Keep in mind, that if you store each glyph into a separate texture, you''re going to change textures at every character you draw. Changing the current active texture is an expensive state change operation on common hardware, and will massively slow you down on large amounts of text. Putting everything together into a single texture avoids this problem."There we are, which I guess invalidates both bitmapFonts and outlineFonts for a large amount of text. 