With the integrations of my text patches, the text rendering is much closer to the original version. Unfortunately, it was found that they also caused memory corruption, resulting in segfaults when using the TinyGL rendering path.
First, I wasn’t sure exactly what was causing the segfaults, just that they were happening at seemingly random intervals and that the backtrace usually involved a text function such as drawing or freeing a text object. I put the game into gdb and found that I couldn’t reliably trigger the bug to investigate the problem. I then tried running ResidualVM in valgrind and found that when creating the text object with the function createTextObject in the TinyGL rendering path, when creating the text bitmap, there was a buffer overrun. To be sure, I added an assertion to this path that asserted when the bitmap offset was larger than the bitmap storage. This confirmed the issue!
So, what changed to cause the bitmap size to be smaller than expected? If we look at the code, it appears that the TinyGL engine is allocating the text object bitmap using the kerned height and width. As it turns out, this isn’t actually enough space to hold the completed text because there’s an additional piece of information, the column offset. When a letter is printed without using the whole kerned space (as in the character “1”), there’s an offset added to the starting column to account for this, letting the game use less storage for the character. When I accounted for this extra width, along with adding a new function to take the y offset into consideration as well, the segfault was fixed and text was rendered properly in TinyGL again! This was submitted in PR #1024.