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A Decade of Slug

A Decade of Slug

mwkaufma

Comments (38)

  • miloignis
    This is wonderful news, and my sincere thanks to the author. I remember coming upon this algorithm several years ago, and thinking it was extremely elegant and very appealing, but being disappointed by the patent status making it unusable for FOSS work. I really appreciate the author's choice to dedicate it to the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, and congratulations on the success it had while proprietary!Now if I ever get around to writing that terminal emulator for fun, I'll be tempted to do it with this algorithm for the code's aesthetic appeal.
  • andai
    This is super cool. A few years ago I was wondering if Ruffle could do something similar, incorporate some kind of GPU accelerated vector graphics.At the time they were going with, approximating the curves out of triangles. I don't know if they're still doing that though.
  • wei03288
    The interesting engineering decision is keeping Bézier curve data on the GPU and resolving coverage at the fragment stage, rather than pre-rasterizing into an atlas. The atlas approach is faster on the hot path but breaks at oblique/perspective viewing angles, and glyphs rendered outside the cached size range look rough — both problems that matter for in-world text in games.The hard part to replicate isn't the math (the paper covers it) — it's the edge case handling for self-intersecting curves and winding number computation for complex glyphs. CJK characters especially. Getting that right without per-character preprocessing is the subtle bit.The open-source announcement is the real news. msdfgen is the most widely used alternative but doesn't have the same production validation Slug has from a decade of game engine use.
  • cachius
    His latest project is https://radicalpie.com/A Professional Equation Editor for Windows 10/11 for 60$ that uses Slug for rendering. Presumably he‘s using it to write his great FGED books.
  • astroalex
    I used Slug at a previous job. It is an excellent, artfully crafted library; really the pinnacle of software engineering in my opinion. Thanks to the author for donating the algorithm to the public domain!
  • fasterik
    This is great news. With the speed of hardware these days, there's really no excuse not to render glyphs directly from the Bézier curves with analytic anti-aliasing. Past solutions like texture atlases and SDFs always felt like a hack and produced sub-par results at arbitrary scales. Hopefully with the open-sourcing of Slug, more major libraries and game engines will adopt the high quality approach.
  • amagitakayosi
    Amazing, Thank you Eric!!Also, Microsoft's Loop-Blinn patent for cubic curves will expire on March 25. These might change the landscape of text rendering...
  • byearthithatius
    Love it when someone who makes complex, helpful software is rewarded for their efforts. More stories like this!
  • Cthulhu_
    Damn, I worked with the author's game engine (C4) about... 20 years ago now while still in school, didn't know they were still active in that area!
  • VikingCoder
    Is it on ShaderToy yet? :D
  • lacoolj
    > But I think that’s too long. The patent has already served its purpose well, and I believe that holding on to it any longer benefits nobody.Damn dude didn't you pay like ... over $10k for that patent?
  • Vipitis
    I am sorta in a position where implementing a glyph renderer as a compute shader would be helpful. This is a great opportunity to use this as a reference... exciting weekend project!
  • Validark
    Awesome algorithm and thank you for donating it to open source!
  • adamrezich
    Finally, some good video game development news!
  • swiftcoder
    Lengyel continues to be standup dude, kudos!
  • leecommamichael
    Thank you!
  • Iamkkdasari74
    this is very cool
  • maximilianburke
    Amazing! Thank you, Eric!
  • forrestthewoods
    Oh wow this is crazy. This was a project that was reasonably successful commercially. And now it’s just being given away open source? What an absolutely incredibly gift to the community!!
  • moralestapia
    Thank you for your service!
  • myylogic
    [dead]
  • rrauenza
    Here's an alternate if you're also getting connection reset errors:https://web.archive.org/web/20260317185928/https://terathon....