No. Almost everything in this video is wrong. This is is actually a very inefficient way to render that spinner, likely done out of sheer indifference and laziness. The author of this video is an impostor; he actually has almost no idea what he's talking about.
@@jamesrosewell9081 there's nothing wrong with being misinformed, what's wrong is telling a bunch of people something you don't even know, as though you've received some expert wisdom.
@@microcolonelit's just a presentational style, if you've fallen into thinking that anything that's put out with a presentational style is absolute truth, you're the one that's silly
Webdings was specifically promoted by Microsoft to be the web's dingbat font. This was back when the internet was slow and you can't download fonts for websites on the fly.
Fonts are so underrated, they make up for a lot of the UI icons even on default windows installations. The Ethernet indicator for example is also just a character of a font windows has.
The Half-Life 2 icon font is malformed, and the "toilet" used for death by falling/launched physics prop goes above the "maximum ascender" in the font metrics, which the Source Engine uses to allocate the bitmap into which the icon is rendered. The Win32 API double-checks the bounds, but Wine originally didn't, and this led to buffer overflows and crashes. It was one of the first crashes I fixed for the Wine project way back then. Last time I checked, the top of the toilet icon is still clipped on all Source games on all platforms.
@@greatwavefan397looping was cool the first time I saw it, then it got old fast. some do have cool transitions (eg. with graphics) but eh most ppl are lazy with it
It isn't fast. Font rendering is extremely complicated and it's completely needless for rendering a spinner. They did it this way because MS doesn't have any technical artists who can draw a handful of circles and clear them. 😂
@@microcolonel They probably preload the font into memory and then slideshow it via a custom function. There's no reason to invoke the entire API. I've written similar code; it's often two or more orders of magnitude faster than using an API. In one case, GDI+ took 6 seconds per pixel, my code was a few nanoseconds...
Interesting part about the FL Studio ui being a font is what allows stuff like the FL Studio logo to be used in Patcher presets, since it's just typed in.
Using fonts for the spinner might seem absurd, but there are some rationale behind it: 1. Other parts of the bootloader already uses fonts, so they could reuse the renderer for them. 2. Vector fonts such as TTF and OTF can be scaled to all screen sizes. 3. TTF and OTF (at least the relevant part) is easier to support than other vector formats, such as SVGs. 4. This still allows the UI team to swap out the spinner (not that they do lol) compared to a hardcoded spinner. Many other programs do this because a font renderer usually comes with the engine they're using, so if all you need are outlines and you want to support all screen sizes, using fonts might be the best option.
But unlike what the video says: it isn't particularly efficient; they did it this way because they didn't care and were too lazy to do it a more elegant way.
@@microcolonel You do know that fonts, demending on what is driving the system, are basically as simple as a string of bits for the drawing routine. It is like sprites on an NES. It is INSANELY efficient since it doesnt need a special program as it is always available. Load the font display text and done. If the font was made to be available in the bios it probably could even run in there
@@Alpine_flo92002 not only is this still wrong in the specific case you mentioned, but it is also not applicable in the actual case we are talking about. This is a vector/outline font, not a bitmap font. They are loading it with an OpenType shaper, scaler, and rasterizer; this is tens of megabytes of code to do something that can be done in under 100 bytes of code. And no, they are not using the BIOS/board firmware's font renderer; most board firmware doesn't have an outline font renderer in it, and there would be no reliable way for them to call into it anyway. P.S. sprite sheets are only fast on the NES because the scanout hardware directly reads from the sprite memory. In the case of windows, it is manually drawing pixels into a retained frame buffer.
@@autismspirit SDF rendering is not used on HUD fonts. The weapons you see in the HUD are just TTF files rendered as any other text. SDF (signed distance field) is a common concept for rendering scalable graphics, whether 2D or 3D as pixels can be represented as a distance within a given boundary. Valve have applied it to 2D graphics that appear in-world, such as decals, but not HUD elements. The HUD elements just use traditional font rendering, optimized for speed rather than legibility.
Its a bit more complicated than that. Theres multiple versions of the animation in the system. The font version is only used for the update screen etc after the system has actually mostly booted, as it relies on the font and graphics stack being loaded to use the font version. Earlier in the boot process (the first time you see it) its just a series of bitmap frames. Theres a version as resources in a dll somewhere too but I cant be bothered finding it currently. Thats used for setup app versions of the animation. Older versions of windows (9x era) used to use a single bitmap image with colour palette cycling to do a boot animation, early NT just did a text mode "..." one dot at a time.
old computer games (like commodore 64 era) actually used this trick EVERYWHERE, like the entire game made in custom fonts since the ram was so so limited at the time
@@metatechnologist No, not really. Sprites are moveable objects that are independent from other graphics or text. Think of a Pokemon trainer vs the Pokecenter sign in old Pokemon games.
@@metatechnologist No, that's not what sprites mean. A sprite is basically an object that can be moved and animated separately from other stuff. On the C64 and similar, the screen was (for the most part) drawn with text only, so it was common to use a custom font to display graphics.
Makes perfect sense to me. Back in the old days of computing and gaming, when RAM was extremely expensive and video chips and CPUs were laughably under-powered by today's standards, using character sets or "tiles" as they are sometimes called was an efficient and very fast way to display graphics. For example, on the Commodore 64, the main screen is 320 x 200 pixels, or 64000 pixels. If you wanted to freely define every pixel on a screen you'd need 8000 bytes, or about 1/8th of the total available memory JUST for one screen. But if you use redefined characters (tiles) instead, it only takes 1000 bytes (since 320 x 200 translates to 40 x 25 characters) per screen. The limitation is that you only have 256 characters you can use (though they can be redefined on-the-fly if needed). With some compression tricks you can easily fit dozens of screens into memory and still have room for the main code etc.
When I was learning to program, one of the first tutorials I found was one that taught me who writes code for a chess game it actually uses a font for the pieces.
Irony (definition): The most devolved thing in the widest-used computer operating system is a font that tells you that you can't use your computer at that moment. See also: Microsoft.
Fun fact marlett the fallback font in windows xp is still in windows 11 and can be read by adobe illustrator Sam applies to most if not all of the autoCAD fonts
Fun fact: you can also go into eucedit right now and create your own custom characters to use in windows or programs. They won't display on other machines though since they don't have the same font. I did this back in the early 2000s on the 3D text screensaver.
i think you can change the boot logo although it may trigger secure boot for some bios. Its even a security issue right now i think cause some made icons that can run code and some secure boot do not check for the icons...
bruh fonts are sets of glyps . literally icon.. xD u can make ur own icon.. u can design svg one and convert it into a font.. whats good about it.. its like a tileset in a game.
Destiny 2 also handles their icons with a special font. Every single damage type, weapon type, element, button inputs on PC and consoles is there. Even every single exotic weapon (which they all have their own individual silhouette in the UI) is in that font. Very cool!
i dont remember where i saw it, but years ago i saw a website that let you create your own hand-written font! you'd print out a reference sheet, write each character in the respective spaces, then scan it back into your computer. then you upload that scan to the site and it gives you a font file you can use as the default font for Windows. so then all text is your own handwriting!
The "semilight" at the end of the name suggests that there could be a light type and, even better, a BOLD type of that font. Extra thiccc Windows startup loading screen.
I have a theory that the spinning circle exists because marketing asked a bunch of people what they didn't like about Windows and a lot of them said "the hourglass"
I think my favourite use for fonts has to be for notation in software like sibelius or dorico, its even *standardised* across apps by something called SMUFL
It's actually ingenious to use a font on this. Because GIF will just be a bloat file during boot sequence when it doesn't need to know what a GIF format is during that phase. GIF is a file size on its own, recoginizing what a GIF format and how to render it is anothet set of file sizes that a boot hardware doesn't need to know. Font is enough.
I remember thinking it was a font (or could be) but never really looked into it since it wasnt a big deal, i remember being able to right click and select it during boot and it would have the same blue select box that would also show up on selected text in windows
Ngl early Microsoft was soo good. The xp was the best window i have ever used. Never once crashed on me. And i used it for 12+ years. Now Microsoft does not give a damn about their consumer products like at all.
Former MSFT PM for win32 controls 🙋progress control is in comctl32.dll (and in user32.dll). IIRC, neither library is loaded during boot the boot sequence. Hence using a font to render it, whereas the controls use bitmaps.
This is also how FontAwesome works, by taking advantage of fonts and ligatures, it can store a multitude of glyphs for fraction of the size, making it a very optimised way to have an icon set
Fun Fact: if you use the infinite health glitch in Half-Life 1 while having suit power, the battery will go above 999, though it shows multiple icons from parts of the game. This is because most of the HUD and even the title at the start of the game is actually part of the font the game uses. It will continue until there is nothing left to put for the suit power, crashing the game.
I've literally tried to program this and wondered "how the hell did they get this running so smoothly on basically everything", makes so much sense now, might even have to borrow this depending on whether fonts are more efficient than spritesheets or images, which will depend on platform and language.
the fastest way is to render an Atlas and switch the sprite every frame... font rendering is definitely and objectively slower... I don't know why Microsoft decided to do it this way...
I’ve began to learn that since I’ve started learning web development and it’s really cool to keep seeing things and realizing they’re fonts, like I just made a mobile menu that uses the “hamburger menu” icon and a multiplication sign as a way to open and close the menu
Fun font fact: For a little while there when Destiny 2 first came to Steal, you could put in-game symbols in your Steam username and they'd show up, in game. Ah, rest in peace, Peace Was Never An [Options]
Fonts are a versatile tool for UI design, even for simple animations like spinners. It's a clever way to ensure scalability and ease of customization in the long run.
During windows 95 and 98, I used to play with paint that was on windows 95 and 98. I even used to play solitaire, minesweeper, pinball machine and even mah-john and whatever game that was free that was included with windows 95 and 98. With ms-dos, I even play games on floppy disks like indianapolis 500, winter challenge, lemmings, jeopardy, wheel of fortune and even hollywood squares. I grew up watching alot of game shows on tv as a kid and I ended up playing the games on floppy disks during the era of ms-dos. Even super market sweep was entertaining to watch and I wanted to be contestant on super market sweep lol.
Fun fact: Someone technically made the same use with geometry props and a lot of scripting for the intro to the Shrek movie and it can even make other stuff!
Imagine a whole game made just with fonts...
That's it. I'm doing it.
Back in the day that's how games were actually made when computers could not display graphics.
@@volvo09 yes, they were just ASCII art. But he means everything is just rendered fonts.
dwarf fortress?
Tetris with fonts I think there is a ganr dev on CZcams who made such a game using c++
"What is your mood today?"
"(Gravity Gun)"
mmm soup
mmm soup
Soup
mmm doup
Mmm soup
This was a side quest for a passionate engineer at microsoft for sure
No. Almost everything in this video is wrong. This is is actually a very inefficient way to render that spinner, likely done out of sheer indifference and laziness.
The author of this video is an impostor; he actually has almost no idea what he's talking about.
@@microcolonel He's misinformed at worst, man
@@microcolonelwhy are you still talking? You already lost the argument in the other comments section…
@@jamesrosewell9081 there's nothing wrong with being misinformed, what's wrong is telling a bunch of people something you don't even know, as though you've received some expert wisdom.
@@microcolonelit's just a presentational style, if you've fallen into thinking that anything that's put out with a presentational style is absolute truth, you're the one that's silly
HALF LIFE AND FL STUDIO MENTIONED🗣🗣🗣🔥🔥🔥
Fr man FL studio producer here and half life fan
Fl studio gang
FL gang🔥🔥
FL GANG
Fl gang🔥
Oddly makes me nostalgic for Webdings and Wingdings. Those fonts were pretty much emojis before emojis existed.
🤔
Webdings was specifically promoted by Microsoft to be the web's dingbat font. This was back when the internet was slow and you can't download fonts for websites on the fly.
Dark darker yet darker
Also Arial font has hidden "emoji". Run> charmap.exe
Hi I'm wing gaster
Fonts are so underrated, they make up for a lot of the UI icons even on default windows installations. The Ethernet indicator for example is also just a character of a font windows has.
Actually you picked just the one that isnt. (Up untill win10 probably) they are stored in the explorer.exe resources.
Username checks out lol
@@bluelemonade415 His honest reaction: -..--
C:\Windows\Fonts\segmdl2.ttf
It's just another step for laziness
"It's so good that no FOSS project has been able to replicate it's speed"
straight up Microsoft propaganda.
i was about to say the same thing lol, isn’t that straight up misinfo?
Is it true?
the thread isn't about the font, at least read before you deservedly shit on microsoft
@@42seven Might’ve helped if the thread was actually presented in the order it was sent
What?
The Half-Life 2 icon font is malformed, and the "toilet" used for death by falling/launched physics prop goes above the "maximum ascender" in the font metrics, which the Source Engine uses to allocate the bitmap into which the icon is rendered. The Win32 API double-checks the bounds, but Wine originally didn't, and this led to buffer overflows and crashes. It was one of the first crashes I fixed for the Wine project way back then.
Last time I checked, the top of the toilet icon is still clipped on all Source games on all platforms.
how to get the icons
@@Nifzon They are available within the Half-Life 2 resource folder (hl2/resource/halflife2.ttf)
Non looped shorts > Looped shorts
watch > shorts
Fr
Yeah, looping is corny and I see no point in it unless it's cleverly used as a comedic device.
@@greatwavefan397looping was cool the first time I saw it, then it got old fast. some do have cool transitions (eg. with graphics) but eh most ppl are lazy with it
How do you make shorts not loop
so Microsoft was able to optimize a spiny circle to run on every video card ever, but when it comes to the whole os optimization, no one cares 💀
”It's Faster than any FOSS implementation "- Microsoft Shill.
It isn't fast. Font rendering is extremely complicated and it's completely needless for rendering a spinner. They did it this way because MS doesn't have any technical artists who can draw a handful of circles and clear them. 😂
Idk bro, my 2009 laptop can run win 11 nicely (except browsing internet because, well, internet right now is resource hogger)
@@microcolonel They probably preload the font into memory and then slideshow it via a custom function. There's no reason to invoke the entire API. I've written similar code; it's often two or more orders of magnitude faster than using an API. In one case, GDI+ took 6 seconds per pixel, my code was a few nanoseconds...
This comment is how you instantly know they know nothing about Windows, or OS's in general.
Interesting part about the FL Studio ui being a font is what allows stuff like the FL Studio logo to be used in Patcher presets, since it's just typed in.
Using fonts for the spinner might seem absurd, but there are some rationale behind it:
1. Other parts of the bootloader already uses fonts, so they could reuse the renderer for them.
2. Vector fonts such as TTF and OTF can be scaled to all screen sizes.
3. TTF and OTF (at least the relevant part) is easier to support than other vector formats, such as SVGs.
4. This still allows the UI team to swap out the spinner (not that they do lol) compared to a hardcoded spinner.
Many other programs do this because a font renderer usually comes with the engine they're using, so if all you need are outlines and you want to support all screen sizes, using fonts might be the best option.
But unlike what the video says: it isn't particularly efficient; they did it this way because they didn't care and were too lazy to do it a more elegant way.
@@microcolonel You do know that fonts, demending on what is driving the system, are basically as simple as a string of bits for the drawing routine. It is like sprites on an NES. It is INSANELY efficient since it doesnt need a special program as it is always available. Load the font display text and done. If the font was made to be available in the bios it probably could even run in there
@@Alpine_flo92002 not only is this still wrong in the specific case you mentioned, but it is also not applicable in the actual case we are talking about. This is a vector/outline font, not a bitmap font. They are loading it with an OpenType shaper, scaler, and rasterizer; this is tens of megabytes of code to do something that can be done in under 100 bytes of code. And no, they are not using the BIOS/board firmware's font renderer; most board firmware doesn't have an outline font renderer in it, and there would be no reliable way for them to call into it anyway.
P.S. sprite sheets are only fast on the NES because the scanout hardware directly reads from the sprite memory. In the case of windows, it is manually drawing pixels into a retained frame buffer.
@@microcolonelWomp Womp OSS doesn’t compete here. Cope 😂
@@reeddeer793 literally has nothing to do with that; whether you use ClearType or FreeType, it's a waste to use any font renderer for this.
The one in the bios is a font, correct. However the loading circles on log in and shutdown are actually animated.
Yeah you can see the difference in smoothness
oh hi
Font can be animated...
Damn i didn't know HL2 used fonts to represent those weapons in the inv
Is so optimized(native hardware acceleration for the anti aliasing) 😅, at least on CSS
Vector graphics on the cheap.
I remembered you can break counter strike source ui by installing the counter-strike font
Valve actually released a paper on their sharp and well-optimized font rendering in Source games, called SDF rendering.
@@autismspirit SDF rendering is not used on HUD fonts. The weapons you see in the HUD are just TTF files rendered as any other text.
SDF (signed distance field) is a common concept for rendering scalable graphics, whether 2D or 3D as pixels can be represented as a distance within a given boundary.
Valve have applied it to 2D graphics that appear in-world, such as decals, but not HUD elements. The HUD elements just use traditional font rendering, optimized for speed rather than legibility.
Its a bit more complicated than that. Theres multiple versions of the animation in the system. The font version is only used for the update screen etc after the system has actually mostly booted, as it relies on the font and graphics stack being loaded to use the font version. Earlier in the boot process (the first time you see it) its just a series of bitmap frames.
Theres a version as resources in a dll somewhere too but I cant be bothered finding it currently. Thats used for setup app versions of the animation.
Older versions of windows (9x era) used to use a single bitmap image with colour palette cycling to do a boot animation, early NT just did a text mode "..." one dot at a time.
7 had beautiful gif
Congratz, you just spoke into existence a entire community dedicated to making a better FOSS version of it.
Except Freetype2 is faster than both GDI and DirectWrite, so they have nothing to do...
@@IsmaelLuceno What are you talking about? FreeType is bloatware, and GDI is the fastest TrueType renderer.
TrueType has open source implementations, so yeah open source software can and does match it's efficiency.
Yes ikr what was he talking about? Write it in assembly to roll through it's characters to get the animation. As fast as anything.
@@metatechnologist not that works on an AT in 1989. It's all ASM iirc
When you read the tweet, it’s actually talking about USB VGA adapters. The video is misleading.
It is ragebait. Guy has something against free software and wanted smart asses to correct him in the comment section to generate engagement.
@@cancernameYeah
old computer games (like commodore 64 era) actually used this trick EVERYWHERE, like the entire game made in custom fonts since the ram was so so limited at the time
Aren't they called "sprites" in that form?
@@metatechnologist
No, not really. Sprites are moveable objects that are independent from other graphics or text. Think of a Pokemon trainer vs the Pokecenter sign in old Pokemon games.
@@metatechnologist No, that's not what sprites mean. A sprite is basically an object that can be moved and animated separately from other stuff. On the C64 and similar, the screen was (for the most part) drawn with text only, so it was common to use a custom font to display graphics.
As a FL Studio user didn't expect that that's wild 😮
Makes perfect sense to me. Back in the old days of computing and gaming, when RAM was extremely expensive and video chips and CPUs were laughably under-powered by today's standards, using character sets or "tiles" as they are sometimes called was an efficient and very fast way to display graphics. For example, on the Commodore 64, the main screen is 320 x 200 pixels, or 64000 pixels. If you wanted to freely define every pixel on a screen you'd need 8000 bytes, or about 1/8th of the total available memory JUST for one screen. But if you use redefined characters (tiles) instead, it only takes 1000 bytes (since 320 x 200 translates to 40 x 25 characters) per screen. The limitation is that you only have 256 characters you can use (though they can be redefined on-the-fly if needed). With some compression tricks you can easily fit dozens of screens into memory and still have room for the main code etc.
In like windows 95, 98 and 2000 the scroll, minimize, maximize and exit buttons were actually also font.
same thing in modern versions as well. if your fonts are corrupted or are on an unfinished install, the buttons don't render properly
if its not font then what should it be? 😮
Marlett.
@@Kern1909could just be bitmaps
fontawesome also has a huge library of icons and stuff to use on websites
Wanted to write this comment o) Using their free versions for years, since v4.
When I was learning to program, one of the first tutorials I found was one that taught me who writes code for a chess game it actually uses a font for the pieces.
Thats a very old trick, even before Windows. DOS also _mutated_ the font in memory on the fly to show mouse cursor arrow.
That makes sense. Sometimes my old laptop would show all of the line icons side by side instead of my cursor. The chain of icons was pretty long too.
Irony (definition):
The most devolved thing in the widest-used computer operating system is a font that tells you that you can't use your computer at that moment.
See also: Microsoft.
All this time and resources could have been invested into making windows actually good
What? You think it takes years to make couple of images to be put together into a font? Plus it only took one graphic designer, not an entire corp.
Bro just summoned the whole Undertale community 💀
Fun fact marlett the fallback font in windows xp is still in windows 11 and can be read by adobe illustrator Sam applies to most if not all of the autoCAD fonts
The animated Fonts normally are more efficient on the open source side.
"the little circle you probably spent way to long staring at" how did you know...
Fun fact: you can also go into eucedit right now and create your own custom characters to use in windows or programs. They won't display on other machines though since they don't have the same font.
I did this back in the early 2000s on the 3D text screensaver.
"match it's speed and power"
It's a good thing this is a tech channel...
So you can edit the boot spinner >:)
Not really, only if ur a hackerman
I tried, it doesn’t work on the latest 11.
@@laglife its not normally on charmap its kinda hardcoded in windows so its kinda hard to find it
i think you can change the boot logo although it may trigger secure boot for some bios. Its even a security issue right now i think cause some made icons that can run code and some secure boot do not check for the icons...
Fonts are crucial for UI design, especially for animations like spinners. They allow for scalability and customization in the long run.
dead internet theory is real
It being a font instead of a graphic actually makes a lot of sense. But now I'm wondering how many other loading screens are or were just fonts
No way fl studio uses fonts
bruh fonts are sets of glyps . literally icon.. xD u can make ur own icon.. u can design svg one and convert it into a font.. whats good about it.. its like a tileset in a game.
@@backupmemories897 it's the reason it's so good
wow this is smart
Fonts are a vector format that practically everything supports. Kinda makes sense when want them as high-res as possible and SVG isn’t supported.
Destiny 2 also handles their icons with a special font. Every single damage type, weapon type, element, button inputs on PC and consoles is there. Even every single exotic weapon (which they all have their own individual silhouette in the UI) is in that font. Very cool!
Very clever! No need to program an animation which will slow other processes 👍
My name is
my name is, (who?)
my name is (chika chika) slim shady
Nerd Fonts became my favorites when I finally found out how they build their character sets. I love non-letter type sets!
I actually wondered why those old Dell monitors used to have USB hubs on them but after seeing that VGA video adapter it makes sense
This is reminiscent of how old console games did much of their graphics, including text output, with tiles.
A fucking spinning pair of dots is more high tech then their computers
i dont remember where i saw it, but years ago i saw a website that let you create your own hand-written font!
you'd print out a reference sheet, write each character in the respective spaces, then scan it back into your computer. then you upload that scan to the site and it gives you a font file you can use as the default font for Windows. so then all text is your own handwriting!
imagine looking on someone's computer and you just see Half-Life 2 weapon hieroglyphs 💀
I don't know anything about this topic, but I find it wildly fascinating! Thank your for this nugget of knowledge!
The "semilight" at the end of the name suggests that there could be a light type and, even better, a BOLD type of that font. Extra thiccc Windows startup loading screen.
Ah yes, my favorite lowercase letter, the Pump Shotgun
ok i wasn't expecting the fl studio one
Meanwhile Chromebooks using a literal video YOU CAN PAUSE as a loading visual when loading into it on an account you haven’t signed in with before:
I have a theory that the spinning circle exists because marketing asked a bunch of people what they didn't like about Windows and a lot of them said "the hourglass"
Back in Windows 7 you knew your graphics driver wasn't correct because Aero wasn't available. Best OS ever existed 😢
I think my favourite use for fonts has to be for notation in software like sibelius or dorico, its even *standardised* across apps by something called SMUFL
It's actually ingenious to use a font on this. Because GIF will just be a bloat file during boot sequence when it doesn't need to know what a GIF format is during that phase. GIF is a file size on its own, recoginizing what a GIF format and how to render it is anothet set of file sizes that a boot hardware doesn't need to know. Font is enough.
I remember thinking it was a font (or could be) but never really looked into it since it wasnt a big deal, i remember being able to right click and select it during boot and it would have the same blue select box that would also show up on selected text in windows
Ahh lit when you said go nuts my phone felt on my nuts😢😅
Ngl early Microsoft was soo good. The xp was the best window i have ever used. Never once crashed on me. And i used it for 12+ years.
Now Microsoft does not give a damn about their consumer products like at all.
Microsoft: optimized the boot loading screen
FOSS: *Optimized the whole Operating System*
Former MSFT PM for win32 controls 🙋progress control is in comctl32.dll (and in user32.dll). IIRC, neither library is loaded during boot the boot sequence. Hence using a font to render it, whereas the controls use bitmaps.
That's how loading icons were done on the Wii and DS. It used several characters and would swap through them in a loop
-this channel always has something interesting-
I have the feeling that having a font and rendering text is cheaper than rendering images.
This is also how FontAwesome works, by taking advantage of fonts and ligatures, it can store a multitude of glyphs for fraction of the size, making it a very optimised way to have an icon set
I thought it was just a sequence of images, but fonts also make sense.
They can be vector based and bitmap based.
NGL, hands down the most useful thing I've gained from UFD 😂
I was just thinking about the other day how that circle was working while installing windows on a mac , interesting info
I know a lot about the inner workings of Windows, but not even I knew this.
Me and bro typing our 3,000 word essay in Windows loading font:
This is actually fascinating. I had no idea.
Fun Fact: if you use the infinite health glitch in Half-Life 1 while having suit power, the battery will go above 999, though it shows multiple icons from parts of the game. This is because most of the HUD and even the title at the start of the game is actually part of the font the game uses. It will continue until there is nothing left to put for the suit power, crashing the game.
Ancient Egyptians right now: "WE'RE LEAVING THE FIELD OF REEDS WITH THIS ONE!!"
As someone who's been using FL Studio for over 20 years i can confirm i had no idea the icons where a font
"What do you want for dinner?"
"(Gravity gun sound)"
"Soup? Got it."
“So it’s just a font?”
“Always has been.”
Many graphics symbols and icons used in onscreen game UI are also special custom font.
Windows Classic was also fonts, and most UWP apps in 10/11 also use fonts for the loading circle, or the icons
I've literally tried to program this and wondered "how the hell did they get this running so smoothly on basically everything", makes so much sense now, might even have to borrow this depending on whether fonts are more efficient than spritesheets or images, which will depend on platform and language.
the fastest way is to render an Atlas and switch the sprite every frame... font rendering is definitely and objectively slower... I don't know why Microsoft decided to do it this way...
This gives me an idea on how to make a program using fonts instead of programming an animation 😂
I’ve began to learn that since I’ve started learning web development and it’s really cool to keep seeing things and realizing they’re fonts, like I just made a mobile menu that uses the “hamburger menu” icon and a multiplication sign as a way to open and close the menu
i mean its literally vector graphics but usable anywhere right?
Something I noticed with a Windows 11 one is that the balls are being cut in half on their spawn/Despawn location.
Fun font fact: For a little while there when Destiny 2 first came to Steal, you could put in-game symbols in your Steam username and they'd show up, in game.
Ah, rest in peace, Peace Was Never An [Options]
Fonts are a versatile tool for UI design, even for simple animations like spinners. It's a clever way to ensure scalability and ease of customization in the long run.
hello chicken
OMG I love this fact. Last cool thing I saw was an entire programming language made of emojis.
The Magnum is the Money Character 😂😂 i love it
When you're making things, it's super handy to use fonts for icons
- Hi! How are hou today?
- *Half-life RPG Launcher*
During windows 95 and 98, I used to play with paint that was on windows 95 and 98. I even used to play solitaire, minesweeper, pinball machine and even mah-john and whatever game that was free that was included with windows 95 and 98. With ms-dos, I even play games on floppy disks like indianapolis 500, winter challenge, lemmings, jeopardy, wheel of fortune and even hollywood squares. I grew up watching alot of game shows on tv as a kid and I ended up playing the games on floppy disks during the era of ms-dos. Even super market sweep was entertaining to watch and I wanted to be contestant on super market sweep lol.
Great to see Brick has followed his dreams
Fun fact: Someone technically made the same use with geometry props and a lot of scripting for the intro to the Shrek movie and it can even make other stuff!
"Wait all the graphics are just text displayed in fonts?" - me
"always has been"
Marlett is a usable font that is used in common Windows UI.
time to speak loading circle 🗣️🗣️ ‼️
Aparantly, if you use a ctrl f to find something in a browser and put a space there (space bar) it will show a ton of them in the scroll bar
now i need that gravity gun font to flex
Yall got it easy there, here where i live we got NO SIDEWALKS 🤯
That’s actually pretty smart I’d never have thought to do that like that
Counter Strike: Source also use fonts as weapon icons. I knew it since my CS:S bugged and showed actual text like "g" or "a" in HUD