[World] Serendipity

[Daniel Phillips]

I added code to render the font album using pure alpha blending instead of a 
full color rgba map as in the previous images. Guess what? My rgba hack looks 
better... a lot better. You be the judge, compare font10.png, rendered 
"properly" as an alpha texture, to font11.png, rendered as rgba with hacked 
alpha.

No contest, right? If you look really closely the rgba version seems to have a 
dark border. I caused that by amplifying the alpha values all across the 
colored region of the glyph in an attempt to make the solid color region 
stronger and the transparent blending region smaller. It had the side effect of 
amplifying some of the surrounding black pixels too. It is a subtle change, 
but the visual effect is not subtle... something about it tricks the eye into 
perceiving a really sharp boundary.

To be honest, I never would have considered hand rolling an alpha map like 
this instead of following the standard recipe, if my image loader had not been 
broken. And would therefore not have discovered this cute trick to sharpen up 
tiny fonts. See Serendipity, above.

The alpha map loader is fixed now because it has a lot of uses, and boy was 
that a fight. There is a weird gotcha with loading odd sized textures in 
OpenGL. You have to tell OpenGL to use single-byte alignment, and you 
basically have to read all the documentation in the world to know that, which 
nobody ever does including me. The default behavior is to turn your nice image 
into random scribbles.

OK, this is going to be a flag on bitmap font creation. You can optionally have 
single byte text that isn't as pretty (but who knows, it might be better 
sometimes) or you can use four times the texture memory and have sharp text. 
Anyway, I guess this short diversion into the land of bizarre color effects 
turned out to be worth it.

Regards,

Daniel
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