[peetle]

This look exciting, but I am obsessed with the lack of subpixel rendering for fonts in godot (imgui, nanovg, etc). The fonts just look crummy to me.

As I understand it, subpixel rendering is a treacherous patent landscape. Is that the reason why it is consistently missing from these tools?

[Jasper_]

It's more because it's a fairly niche technique that requires either dual-source blending or constant blend colors, things that game rendering engineers don't think about often. It's also tricky to make work with transparency, which is the reason OS X ditched it. Basically, nobody in the video games space does it frequently.

Maybe I should clean up and open-source my subpixel text renderer that uses dual-source blending....

[mooman219]

Subpixel text rendering also requires intimate knowledge of the display being rasterized for, and becomes a mess once you enter multiple displays with different pixel layouts. I was working on support in my font library https://github.com/mooman219/fontdue/, but it quickly becomes not worth it. I'm interested to see your approach to the problem if your project is online!

[derac]

do it man! point the godot devs to it as well :D

[checker659]

FYI, there's no subpixel rendering in macOS anymore (since 10.15).

[steerablesafe]

As far as I know all Microsoft patents expired in this area.

edit: seems like it wasn't too long ago.

https://www.freetype.org/patents.html

[gameswithgo]

After you see really nice fonts, and get used to them, bad ones just drive you crazy. a 1440p or 4k monitor for instance, after having one you don't want to use a 1080p monitor for text any more!

I imagine for games its partly a performance issue that they don't do fancier font rendering sometimes.