Howdy folks,
I'm building a little game and engine heavily influenced by Casey's Handmade Hero, but swapping out the software renderer for DirectX 11. FWIW, I'm completely new to graphics programming.
I was about to start working on displaying debug text and I was planning on using the stb library to prerasterize a font and then draw each character as a 2d texture across a quad. I think that will work fine for a little debug text here and there, but is there a better solution for the final game if I end up needing a lot of dynamic (e.g., user entered) text displayed?
I figure for any large known sentences I can create a single texture in advance. But I don't know what a good strategy is for text I don't know in advance other than many draw calls. If I have hundreds of extra draw calls, I'm guessing I'll be able to handle that OK, but it also feels a little wasteful. For example, is there maybe a direct3d method of lining up a bunch of textures side-by-side on a quad for a single draw call?
(I'm aware that there is some kind of DirectWrite API, but I had read somewhere that it may have some quirks with DX11 and if I can just use Direct3D instead I think I'd prefer to do so.)
Thanks!