Caxton

This is a test of a major revision in how glyphs are stored to evaluate its viability.

Previously, Caxton created texture atlases for all of the glyphs of a font during resource loading and uploaded them as textures onto the GPU.

This version still computes the MSDF images of each glyph at load time but maintains a dynamic atlas and uploads the glyph textures to the GPU when the respective glyphs are first used. This can save GPU memory for large fonts but might otherwise increase overhead. In addition, the atlas implementation has less information to work with (for instance, it can no longer reorder all of the glyphs by descending height).

Depending on your hardware, the font you use, and the other mods you have installed, Caxton 0.3.0-alpha.1 might perform better or worse than 0.2.3. Feedback on this, as well as any bug reports, are welcome on the issue tracker, but remember to mention the version you’re using.

Limitations

• This version overhauls how cached distance fields are stored, so any fonts you load will need their caches regenerated.
• In particular, cached glyph textures are no longer stored as a .png file. In fact, they’re not compressed at all! This means that cache files will be huge. This will be resolved later.
• Cache files now depend on the endianness of your platform.
• When copying glyph bitmaps from CPU to GPU memory, Caxton does not currently validate the offset to the source data. This will be fixed in a later update, but you might want to avoid loading untrusted cache files for now.
• Only 1.19.3 is currently supported.

The source for this version is available in the feature/lazy-vramming branch of the repository.