How comes all other libraries render text just fine? While I agree with you on that it is a driver-specific issue, the driver can definitely be used to render text as usual. It must be a problem with the combination of fglrx + SFML, which will probably not be concerned about int fglrx, making SFML the point where it should be addressed.
I would really appreciate this to be fixed real soon, as it probably does not only occur on my machine, and it can definitely be done correctly. Unfortunately I do not understand the problem, so I cannot help fixing it, only provide a testing machine.
Another interesting fact: I have no problem when drawing a sprite instead of a shape, even though one would expect a sprite to work exactly like a shape, only with texture handling on top... I'll keep investigating.
And one more thing: when I create the sf::Text only once before the loop, it is rendered correctly in all frames. Seems like there is a problem when rendering the text to a buffer texture (SFML is doing this, right), not when rendering it out onto the target.
Even more interesting: when rendering the font's texture directly into a Sprite (see code below), I have a nice glyph page in the first frame, and a white square in the following. This happens even when I only create and modify both the font and the sprite
before the main loop, so it means the font's texture is being corrupted somehow by something that should not even touch it. And it does not seem to be the sf::Text class, since I can completely uncomment that one, giving me an empty glyph page (only a small white dot in the upper left corner) in the first frame, and again the big white square in the following ones. Uncommenting the draw command of the rectangle(s) however leaves the font texture untouched. Now that is weird, since shapes really don't have anything to do with fonts. My guess: does the shape class "construct" a white texture to use the same rendering mechanisms as the sprite class, but overwrites the font glyph page texture in this case?
sf::Sprite sprite(font.getTexture(20));
And more edits: when I use the font texture twice (e.g. render 2 sf::Texts or render one sf::Text and the sf::Sprite with the font's texture) the second (and third and probably all following) render works fine and displays the correct texture. Only the first render after 2 shapes is broken (so yes, I can break the above chain by drawing two shapes in between), these 2 shapes can be separated by other drawing calls to keep it working (either of sf::Text or sf::Sprite with other texture). Rendering another object (e.g. a test sprite) between the shapes and the text fixes the text, the other object however is not being rendered at all. [Hope you understand all of this
]
Shape 1, Shape 2, Text // broken text
Shape 1, Shape 2, Sprite, Shape 3, Text // renders Shape 1-3 and Text, but not Sprite
Shape 1, Sprite, Shape 2, Text // renders everything
Wow, this is confusing. But from my observations above I guess one can see how complicated this problem is, and that is probably has something to do with how textures are handled in SFML.
