Updated XNA Release in April

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In April, Microsoft will be releasing an update to XNA Game Studio Express, including built-in support for bitmap fonts. You can already download a preview of the new font functionality from the XNA site here: Bitmap Font Sample

Nuclex.Fonts will stay around, but unless you require a certain feature that the new official solution won't have, I myself would prefer to use the built-in XNA fonts for the sake of standardization. Still, as far as I can tell, Nuclex.Fonts will keep some advantages over the built-in XNA fonts. Namely these will be: slightly better performance, advanced text alignment options and marginally better visual quality.

I also discovered that some graphics card vendors didn't feel the need to implement texture subregion locking into their drivers (a feature used extensively in Nuclex.Fonts). So I'll have to update the entire texture even if only a tiny bit of it changed, which, asides from wasting buttloads of band-width, will stall the graphics card until all rendering that's using the texture in question has finished.

Makes me wish I could just move to DirectX 10, where every feature exposed in the API is mandatory. If something works for me and not for a customer, I can just skip bug hunting and directly proceed to ranting about the graphics card vendor! :)

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