Font caching / Better sheet font loading

[Marisa the Magician]

I have a mod with very... large unicode fonts, and it's kind of an annoyance that whenever those fonts are first loaded they cause a very noticeable freeze. (which in one case happens when first opening the mod's options menu).

Was wondering if it was possible to add a mapinfo/gameinfo parameter for this, just like the ones for caching actor sprites, sounds, etc.

[Graf Zahl]

Considering that fonts can have many color translations this can turn out very expensive. What kind of font is this? So far I never experienced delays from this with existing fonts.
You are also forgetting that in any normal session only a small subset of the font's characters get used, so this kind of caching would create huge delays.

[Marisa the Magician]

They're sheet fonts. And I do believe that these are always loaded "in whole".

[Graf Zahl]

It's not a caching issue, but an efficiency issue. The sheet fonts currently load the entire sheet for each needed character and that simply adds up.
It might be a good idea to let them extract the needed character data and store it locally instead.

[Rachael]

It's not a caching issue, but an efficiency issue. The sheet fonts currently load the entire sheet for each needed character and that simply adds up.

Yiiikes!

[Graf Zahl]

It was meant to handle the old console font, I just implemented it as a multipatch texture with the whole image being offset so that the character is selected.
Yeah, not the best idea, probably, but for the intended purpose it was enough.

[Marisa the Magician]

Bumping this. Any interest in changing how sheet fonts are handled? It's kind of a pain to have over 50k tiny files for 3 variants of 4 fonts. It makes SLADE take ages to load up the project and also causes bloat due to "size on disk" inflation.

[Marisa the Magician]

I'd like this thread to be closed, I want to suggest an alternative to this.

[Gez]

The alternative being: bundling them in wad files.