Render string to texture in Android and OpenGL ES

I've googled around everywhere, but cannot find much for rendering strings to textures and then displaying that texture on a quad on the screen. Can someone provide a run-down on开发者_如何学Python the process or provide good resources that describe how? Is rendering strings to textures even the best method for displaying text in an Android OpenGL ES app?

EDIT: Okay, so LabelMaker interferes with alpha blending, the texture (created from a PNG with a transparent background) now has a solid black background, rather than a transparent background. If I comment out all the LabelMaker-related code, it works fine.

UPDATE: Nevermind. I took a look at the code to find that LabelMaker was disabling blending after drawing the labels.

I think this is what you are looking for.

If you don't want to use GL extensions you need to create the font as a bitmap and then create a class to convert that string into quads that you can draw.

I use this method with the 2 fonts in my game. I have a class that takes a wide texture with all the letters evenly spaced, and a string that matches the image, then uses lookups on the letters to find out how far in the bitmap it should go.

Your other option is to render your text to a offscreen bitmap using android, and then bind the text as a texture. This will let you use androids built-in font processing and rendering to create texture-based fonts.

The second method I have not used yet, but I have rendered google maps to a offscreen canvas and then bound the bitmap as a GL texture, so doing it for text should be much simpler.

If you are planning to have modifying string data in a gl loop you need to really worry about StringBuilder too, because it causes GC and performance issues. I hardcode all my strings so it doesn't allocate, and all my rapidly numbers are done through a second draw function dedicated to drawing changing numbers without using string-builder.