sf::Shape rendering seems to break sf::Text rendering (2.0RC)

[Kylotan]

I am rendering a lot of text to the screen, and usually it works correctly, but I've found that when I render sf::Shapes too, especially when there are a lot of shapes, the text rendering breaks. Specifically, it looks like either the text texture gets lost or the blending is broken because each glyph is rendered as a filled white square instead of showing the character.

This isn't consistent and it appears that one text can render wrongly while the very next text can appear correctly, with no other rendering taking place between the two. But it only happens when shapes are being drawn in that frame. Commenting out calls to a shape's draw() method fixes the behaviour.

It's as if some part of the rendering state is leaking out from one call to another - but we're just calling draw() on each Drawable without passing in a RenderStates argument, so I would have thought it would reset to normal on each call.

I'm using the default font for all text, but it happened with loaded fonts also (TTF or OTF).

Is this a known bug in SFML? Or if not, is there some way I can help in tracking down what is causing this?

(Using the April 2.0RC build, on Windows 7.)

[eXpl0it3r]

Well the default font is depreciated and already removed in newer versions of SFML, but as you said it's most probably no the source.

I'd kind of guess that you're doing something wrong since I haven't heard of such a problem yet, thus you should provide a complete and minimal example that reproduces the problem.

[Kylotan]

Newer versions? As far as I can tell 2.0RC is the newest version that can be downloaded without building it myself, no? And the live docs say nothing about the default font being deprecated.

As for a minimal example, that's probably not going to happen in the short term so I'm trying to find out if this is a known problem that may have been fixed since 2.0RC.

All I can say, is that we never change the RenderStates, or the Font, but sometimes the text doesn't work, and sometimes it does.

[Laurent]

Could you please show a complete and minimal code that reproduces the problem?

[Kylotan]

As mentioned above, that's unlikely to happen right now. It's a fairly complex project with lots of what gets rendered being conditional on various in-game values, and it'll be quite slow to clone it all and simplify it. However the actual rendering part is simple so I was hoping someone might have some ideas on what could be going wrong.

[Kylotan]

Actually, I got lucky and found a quick repro case.

#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>

int main()
{
        sf::RenderWindow window(sf::VideoMode(900, 900), "Test");

        sf::RectangleShape shOutline;
        sf::Text tName;

        tName.setPosition(sf::Vector2f(10,10));
        tName.setCharacterSize(20);
        tName.setString("Abcdefgh");
        shOutline.setPosition(sf::Vector2f(10,10));
        shOutline.setSize(sf::Vector2f(100,30));
        shOutline.setFillColor(sf::Color(128,128,128,128));
        shOutline.setOutlineColor(sf::Color(255,255,255));
        shOutline.setOutlineThickness(2.0);

        while (1)
        {
                sf::Color darkGreyGreen(10, 30, 10, 255);
                window.clear(darkGreyGreen);

                window.draw(shOutline);
                window.draw(tName);

                window.display();
        }
}
 

The result is shown in the image attached.

And if I comment out window.draw(shOutline), the text renders normally.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Laurent]

It works for me (with the latest sources). What's your OS and graphics card? Are your graphics drivers up to date?

[Kylotan]

Windows 7, AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series (not sure exactly which model, since the Catalyst Control Center doesn't tell me!), latest drivers (12.10).

Note that I'm not using the latest source, but the most recent binary download.

[thisdyingsoul]

Nice, the same problem ^^.
Same config as above, but Radeon HD 5800.
And I´m just get the latest src to verify.

[Kylotan]

thisdyingsoul, did you get the same result with the latest source? I don't want to have to go through the build process unless I'm confident that it will fix the problem.

[FRex]

There are nightly builds in general forum for some compilers.

[Kylotan]

Ah, thank you! I just got the latest nightly and tested with that, and I still see the same problem.

[eXpl0it3r]

Ah, thank you! I just got the latest nightly and tested with that, and I still see the same problem.

And what font did you use?
It works perfectly fine on my end...

[Kylotan]

See the example code above - it uses the default font on Windows. (Arial?) However in my full program I get the same results with other TTF and OTF fonts.

[Laurent]

He asked because in the latest sources there's no more default font, and you said you used the latest sources