2D Graphics and Fonts

Rich 2D drawing

Airplay SDK provides rich 2D drawing support. Images can be loaded from BMP, GIF, PNG and TGA formats (JPG is supported through the use of the open source libjpg library). Memory savings can be achieved through the use of palletised formats and lines, triangles, rectangles and polygons can be drawn using any 'material'. Material objects are used to store rendering-state information such as colour, texture, alpha-blending modes, bilinear filtering mode, etc.

Identical across all devices

Airplay's 2D drawing support is not limited by the underlying OS support for font rendering or image file formats. The developer can therefore be assured that the app they test on the desktop will look the same on any device, pixel-for-pixel.

OpenGL ES support

Airplay seamlessly supports OpenGL ES 1.x and OpenGL ES 2.0. At application start-up, the Airplay runtime checks the device support for hardware graphics acceleration. If OpenGL ES drivers are found (and determined to be usable), then all Airplay drawing (2D and 3D) is pushed through the OpenGL ES drivers. If no drivers are found, then Airplay uses it's own super-fast software renderer.

Additionally, the Airplay runtime performs some clever load-balancing to ensure that the OpenGL ES drivers are used to their best ability. Ideaworks Labs works closely with all the leading mobile GPU providers to ensure that the Airplay runtime knows how to deliver data to the GPU drivers to achieve maximum possible performance. Once again, Airplay does the heavy lifting, so you don't have to.

Software rendering

Airplay provides the world's fastest 2D/3D software renderer for mobile, bar none. We've been working on mobile software renderers for over 10 years. One of the first things we ever did was sell a fast software renderer to Intel and we've been improving on it ever since.

Rich bitmap font support

Airplay SDK provides a tool for generating bitmap fonts from standard Windows font formats. Bitmap fonts can be rendered extremely fast, and have no dependency on the underlying OS font support. Bitmap fonts are stored in an efficient palettised greyscale format, and can be drawn in any colour.

Furthermore, Airplay provides a 1-bit compressed font format, designed to accommodate Asian fonts with large character sets. Characters are decompressed and cached as they are required for rendering. This system allows very large character sets to fit within a small memory footprint.

The Airplay Studio Font Builder