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We used to use FreeType for text in games. The only real negative to it is that you can't support an infinite number of fonts / font resolutions, because each one HAS to be turned into a bitmap for the performance to not be unusably bad.
I'm not sure how this changes that, if at all, but I don't see any sane way in which it even could. SDF may make it so that 36pt text on a 4K display looks better than with the old code, but it's still going to take FAR longer to render than an entire 3D world does, so it'll STILL have to be rendered to texmaps on a per font/resolution pair basis first.
And yes, there are no issues with correctly rendering the anti-aliasing pixels with FreeType: but it DOES take a fair degree of care to not screw it up. However, we never even tried to use ClearType (i.e. subpixel color-based AA), because it was implicit that it would never work as well as greyscale when the background is non-uniform.
I'm not sure how this changes that, if at all, but I don't see any sane way in which it even could. SDF may make it so that 36pt text on a 4K display looks better than with the old code, but it's still going to take FAR longer to render than an entire 3D world does, so it'll STILL have to be rendered to texmaps on a per font/resolution pair basis first.
And yes, there are no issues with correctly rendering the anti-aliasing pixels with FreeType: but it DOES take a fair degree of care to not screw it up. However, we never even tried to use ClearType (i.e. subpixel color-based AA), because it was implicit that it would never work as well as greyscale when the background is non-uniform.
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