Skip to content

Bitmap Text

A Bitmap Text displays a text using a "Bitmap Font" (an image representing characters). This is more performant than a traditional Text object and it allows for complete control on the characters aesthetic.

It's especially useful for scores, titles, button labels, pixel-art games...

Note

As all characters are designed in an external editor, and a texture is generated with these characters, a Bitmap Text is more performant to render but also way less flexible, in particular if you want to display a text entered by a user in any language. If that's the case, take a look at the Text object or at the BBtext object.

Creating "Bitmap Font" files

A font is represented by two files:

  • Bitmap Atlas image : This file is the image which contains all characters that can be draw. File format must be PNG.
  • Bitmap Font : This file contains the data related to characters that can be draw, the engine use these data for knowing which characters render on screen. File format must be FNT or XML.

These two file can be created with an external editor to generate bitmap fonts, for example:

Font size and scale

Because the characters are pre-rendered, the font size can't be changed in GDevelop. But the object still have a scale property, that can be used to make your the text bigger or smaller. Note that the rendering quality can be affected, because the font generated was not prepared to be rescaled.

Font color and tint

As characters are pre-rendered, the font color can also not be changed. GDevelop still allows you to change the tint applied to the rendered characters.

If you generate a Bitmap Font with white characters, and if you use a blue tint, the object will be displayed with this blue color. If your Bitmap Font is grey, and the tint blue, the colours will be mixed with each other.