I'm currently developing a small OpenGL game for the Android platform and I wonder if there's an easy way to render text on top of the rendered frame (like a HUD with the player´s score etc). The text would need to use a custom font also.
I've seen an example using a View as an overlay, but I don't know if I want to do that since I might want to port the game to other platforms later.
Any ideas?
The Android SDK doesn't come with any easy way to draw text on OpenGL views. Leaving you with the following options.
Rendering text to a texture is simpler than what the Sprite Text demo make it looks like, the basic idea is to use the Canvas class to render to a Bitmap and then pass the Bitmap to an OpenGL texture:
// Create an empty, mutable bitmap
Bitmap bitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(256, 256, Bitmap.Config.ARGB_4444);
// get a canvas to paint over the bitmap
Canvas canvas = new Canvas(bitmap);
bitmap.eraseColor(0);
// get a background image from resources
// note the image format must match the bitmap format
Drawable background = context.getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.background);
background.setBounds(0, 0, 256, 256);
background.draw(canvas); // draw the background to our bitmap
// Draw the text
Paint textPaint = new Paint();
textPaint.setTextSize(32);
textPaint.setAntiAlias(true);
textPaint.setARGB(0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00);
// draw the text centered
canvas.drawText("Hello World", 16,112, textPaint);
//Generate one texture pointer...
gl.glGenTextures(1, textures, 0);
//...and bind it to our array
gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, textures[0]);
//Create Nearest Filtered Texture
gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL10.GL_NEAREST);
gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL10.GL_LINEAR);
//Different possible texture parameters, e.g. GL10.GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE
gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL10.GL_REPEAT);
gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL10.GL_REPEAT);
//Use the Android GLUtils to specify a two-dimensional texture image from our bitmap
GLUtils.texImage2D(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, bitmap, 0);
//Clean up
bitmap.recycle();