- Creating the Font Demo Project
- Adding a New Font to the Content Project
- Learning to Use the SpriteFont Class
- Printing Text
- Summary
- Q&A
- Workshop
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Learning to Use the SpriteFont Class
We can create as many fonts as we want in an XNA project and use them at any time to print text with different styles. For each font you want to use in a project, create a new .spritefont file. The name of the file is used to load the font, as you’ll see next. Even if you want to use the same font style with a different point size, you must create a separate .spritefont file (although we will learn how to scale a font as a rendering option).
If the Content class did not use a templated Load() method, we would need to call a different method for every type of game asset, such as Content.LoadSpriteFont(), Content.LoadTexture2D(), or Content.LoadSoundEffect().
There is another important reason for using a template form of Load() here: We can create our own custom content loader to load our own asset files! XNA is very extendable with this capability. Suppose you want to load a data file saved by your own custom level editor tool. Instead of manually converting the level file into text or XML, which XNA can already read, you could instead just write your own custom content loader, and then load it with code such as this:
Content.Load<Level>("level1")
The ability to write code like this is powerful, and reflects a concept similar to “late binding.” This means the C# compiler might not know exactly what type of object a particular line of code is referring to at compile time, but the issue is sorted out later while the program is running. That’s not exactly what’s happening here, but it is a similar concept, and the easiest illustration of template programming I can think of.
These are just possibilities. Let’s get back to the SpriteFont code at hand!