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rezmason • today at 2:22 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Slug looks impressive!

The project I'm most known for is basically an MSDF shader with a bloom pass. It serves my needs 100%, though if I expand to support arbitrary text, I may reach for Slug.

The one issue with MSDF I want to raise is, it seems everybody uses the same msdfgen texture creation program from Viktor Chlumský's master's thesis 11 years ago. I wish there were other implementations. Who ever heard of a graphics technique that was only ever programmed once, and then used everywhere without substantial iteration? We need to de-XKCD-2347 MSDFs for everyone's sake, including and especially Chlumský.


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torginus • today at 3:24 PM

I haven't heard of Chlumský or MSDF before, but I think a lot of people have been aware of the technique before he published his paper, thanks to Valve's TF2 text rendering paper:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120505013814/https://www.valve...

The pdf details only simple SDF, but in the closing paragraphs, it mentions the weakness of the technique and mentions how it can be solved with multiple SDFs, but the exact technique wasn't showcased.

Which led to people trying to reverse engineering it, and making their implementation, for years (it's Valve after all). Including me. Not sure if what I came up with was exactly MSDF, but certainly there are a lot of implementations out there.

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