> Games have done this trick since forever. Text rendering is still a very complex task in modern games unless you're using an engine (and even then the comple

> Games have done this trick since forever. Text rendering is still a very complex task in modern games unless you're using an engine (and even then the complexity is still there it's just hidden). I'm not aware of any recent releases that stored all their text as hard coded images. Most games will at the very least create a predefined charset, render each character to a bitmap or sdf as part of the loading using something like freetype or stb_truetype, cache the bitmaps or sdfs to a hash map with a lookup ID and all that stuff, upload the images to a texture on the GPU, perform some sort of layout scheme when rendering the text in the game world or HUD (which includes things like figuring out the kerning for different characters, line wrap, and all the other fun stuff). Like somebody else mentioned, nothing is simple. Even a bitmap font from the 80s was wayyy more complex then it would be today because of all the optimizations you would have to create to make sure it was fast, and the extreme lack of modern rendering utilities that we have today.* *I wasn't alive in the 80s, so this is just based on the videos I've seen of what we had then and articles/books I've read about what programming was like then.