Just this line of code:
static TextRenderer normalTextRenderer("Fonts/CHERI.TTF", 55, 35, Rgba(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.9f));
Is taking up about 30MB of memory, and it's a pretty simple font. Is this normal? What can I do about it?
I don't think this'd have much to do with it, but what font is it?
Just some font I got at dafont.com (I don't remember the name), but this seems to happen with all fonts, I tried 4 different fonts. The more complex the font though, the more memory it seems to use. But even the simplest ones I tried occupy 20-30MB.
I'd really appreciate some help on this, the game I'm making isn't supposed to take up more than 32MB 
Which version of OpenLayer do you use? Compiled with which compiler? Do you use internal text rendering or GlyphKeeper?
I have a WIP version from about 5-8 months ago (after a certain version globally defined bitmaps stopped appearing, so I've stopped updating since). The compiler is gcc 3.4.2 (mingw-special). I guess I use internal text rendering, because I don't define a GlyphKeeper type.
I don't know much about the state of OL of that time... I can only suggest you try to use the current SVN with the most recent allegroGL, and compile OL with define USE_NEW_TTF set, so the internal text renderer will be used instead of GlyphKeeper. That's at least what I do, and I have just checked that my memory consumption grows by about 600kB when I load a TextRenderer object. I have built with MSVC 7.1, but that should not make such a huge difference.
For the problem of globally defined bitmaps disappearing, that's somewhat strange and if it occurs with the current SVN I could try to help finding what's wrong there.
Is taking up about 30MB of memory...
How do you know that? how can you measure it?
I compare the amount of memory the process uses with and without the font loaded, in the Windows Task Manager. I know that's probably not the best way to do it, but in this case the problem seems obvious.
I don't know open layer, but could it perhaps be rendering the font to a bitmap, and so needing to store the rendered font and if the font has a lot of characters (excess unicode pages?) or rendered at large size then that might explain it.
Well, I don't know how OpenLayer stores the font, I don't load the fonts too big in size (55 pixels height), so there's no reason to save them bigger. It's surely not excess unicode pages, they usually don't have many characters. I even tried one font file that's only 9KB large.
Does this happen with anyone else?
If you only have 32 MB of ram to play around with, i would recommend using plain allegro, or something even simpler, as that is a painfully low limit (silly really).
As i understand it, the font is rendered to a texture (which is then rendered as a texture on a quad). I don't think 30MB is that unreasonable. 55 is pretty big, and the texture has to contain all the characters...
Vasco: I would offer to have a try to compile your sources on my machine, with my versions of the libraries and try it out. You don't use many other libs, I hope? If you're willing to send me sources and data, just zip them and send my a PM for my mail address.
Jonatan Hedborg: I meant 32MB of video memory. The font should be on the video memory right? (Hope I'm not saying something stupid)
I think anything above 3MB is unreasonable. A 1024 x 768 image should be about 3,2MB (right?), and all letters of a font that size surely don't take all that up.
tobing: Thanks for offering your help. All your need to do is run this simple code, with the font I've attached:
| 1 | #include <OpenLayer.hpp> |
| 2 | |
| 3 | using namespace ol; |
| 4 | |
| 5 | int main() { |
| 6 | |
| 7 | if(Setup::SetupProgram() == false) { |
| 8 | allegro_message("Error loading OpenLayer library!"); |
| 9 | exit(-1); |
| 10 | } |
| 11 | |
| 12 | if (Setup::SetupScreen(320, 200, WINDOWED, desktop_color_depth()) == false){ |
| 13 | allegro_message("Error setting graphics mode!"); |
| 14 | exit(-1); |
| 15 | } |
| 16 | |
| 17 | |
| 18 | // Remove this line to compare // |
| 19 | static TextRenderer normalTextRenderer("BADABB__.TTF", 55, 35, Rgba(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.9f)); |
| 20 | |
| 21 | while (!key[KEY_ESC]){ |
| 22 | |
| 23 | } |
| 24 | |
| 25 | return 0; |
| 26 | } |
| 27 | END_OF_MAIN() |
On my system, with the font loaded the process occupies 54.640MB, without the font loaded, 27.420MB.
hmm. yes, you are correct of course. My bad 
But how is it possible to know how much is uploaded to the video card? Afaik, there is no way to know how much video memory is used. And i think openlayer/openGL moves around textures if there is no more room on the video card, so you shouldn't worry about it.
Tested with your font, it also uses about 600kB extra memory... using GlyphKeeper with pure allegro, it takes 300kB extra memory...
Are you sure the font was loaded? Because, that's the extra memory I get if the font file isn't there.
I tried with OpenLayer's latest update with no success.
I've attached the project folder I use for the test case, with the Code::Blocks project file. I'd appreciate it if anyone could try it out.
EDIT: Anybody?