Horde3D

Horde doesn't compile when I switch to Unicode, lots of string work assumes multi-byte characters. I'd like to use Unicode for all my text and I'd like to link with Freetype for font handling.

Any plans for Unicode builds?

I must admit that I don't have much experience with different character sets. Do you think they are required for Horde? I think things like shader context or resource names don't need to be unicode. And if you want to daw Unicode text you need a new font routine anyway (the current one uses a texture with the 256 characters).

Yeah, Unicode will probably only be required for the font system. If a better font utility is developed in the future, this should be taken into account

utf8 encoded text wouldn't need unicode compile param. right?

I will use freetype do you suggest one big texture or multiple textures of fixed size(for example 512x512 textures, so to fit 512 chars you may need two or more textures depending on the font resolution).

I'm working on a font system on another engine at the moment (I'm contracted; can't share the code ), where I pick a texture size (256x256 to 2048x2048), and then use as many textures as required to fit all the glyphs. There is a mapping function where you can give it a character, and it tells you which texture and UV coordinates to use.

Also, when using my font-generator tool in unicode-mode, it would take up too much memory to render every single unicode character to the textures. So the tool opens a text document, and only generates texture data for characters that appear in that document.