JOGL: How can I draw many strings quickly

I'm using JOGL (OpenGL for Java) for my application and I need to draw tons of strings on screen at once and my current solution is far too slow. Right now I'm drawing the strings using TextRenderer using the draw3D method and for even a moderate number of strings (around 300-500), it just kills the FPS. I started messing with drawing text onto the object textures, which is much faster, but there are a few problems with it. The first is that allocating all those textures requires a lot of memory. The second is that I need to find a way to size the texture so its only as big as the string and then map it to the object without stretching. The problem there is that all these thousands of boxes are u开发者_运维百科sing a single model being rendered with a call list. I'm not sure its possible to change the texture mapping for each object in that situation.

I don't mind if the text appears flat or 3D, it just has to be positioned in 3D space. I would prefer to render the text in the highest quality possible without sacrificing too much speed, since readability of the text is the most important part of the application. Also, nearly all of the strings are different, there aren't many duplicates.

So, my question: Am I going down the right path with drawing the strings on the textures, and if so, how can I overcome those 2 problems? Or is there another method that would suit my needs?

Depending on exactly how TextRenderer works - you might be able to use display lists to batch up your text drawing commands.

If TextRenderer works by having a texture of individual character glyphs and piecing together a string a glyph at a time: it'll be fine. just bookend your text drawing code with glNewList and glEndList. Once a list is defined, just use glCallList to use it.

If however, TextRenderer works by drawing complete strings into a texture and using one quad per string - display lists may not work. If the strings in one batch do not all fit within TextRenderer's cache, it will delete the least-recently used one to reclaim some space. Display lists will only recreate the OpenGL calls made, and so the work done by TextRenderer to update the string cache texture will be lost and you'll get incorrect output. From a quick scan of the source, I suspect that TextRenderer works in this manner.

To summarise: Display lists will greatly speed up your rendering, but will only if you don't overflow TextRenderer's string cache texture and don't use the TextRenderer after the display list has been defined.

If you can't meet these constraints you're going to have to go a bit hardcore and write your own text renderer that renders glyph-by-glyph - it'll then be trivial to cache the output geometry and extremely quick to re-render. There's an example of such a system here, with the tool to create a font here. It uses LWJGL rather than JOGL, but the translation between the two will be the least of your worries if you want to integrate it - it's meshed with the texture management etc.