Pompei2 wrote:CrazyEddie wrote:The cost of rendering large amounts of text can be lessened by caching the text to a texture (so you only render two triangles instead of thousands).
Do I understand you correctly that this is already in the new renderer target stuff?
Yes, this is functional. You're able to selectively specify which windows will use texture backing by way of the "AutoRenderingSurface" property (amongst other methods). In the current svn we have this enabled by default only on FrameWindow by way of the looknfeel definitions.
I think one of the new challenges when using this system will be tuning / balancing which windows should and which should not use the texture backing - there is no one size fits all solution here because it's entirely dependent upon usage scenarios. For example, a page of truly static text will definitely gain from being cached to texture, whereas a text that is (for some unknown reason) updated every single frame, would not gain - since we're drawing it every frame anyway, it might as well be directly to the root surface. This in turn has to be factored into the possibility of having multiple levels of texture caching, which again can be good in some scenarios but not in others. Another additional factor is then whether you're using rotation or other effects, since that generally needs the use of texture backed windows (though there are scenarios where this need not be the case; for example, the rotating CEGUI logo in the demos is not a window at all and uses no texture backing, it is drawn by a subscriber to a render queue drawing event).
Take for example the FirstWindow demo, this is potentially
slower when using texture caching, since it's so simple to draw normally; the extra overhead of the RTT usage and setup costs more than just drawing the thing. Whereas things like Demo7 are definitely much, much faster when using caching due to the much more complex nature of the layout.
Pompei2 wrote:Anyways grats on the fast advances you made!
Thanks
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
It should be good once 0.7 is released a little later on - especially to see what people start doing with some of the new facilities.
CE.