The 'Slug' technology, which is useful for displaying text beautifully in games, has been made public domain, and its reference code has also been released for free.



' Slug ' is a font and vector image rendering technology developed by

Eric Lengyel that allows for low-intensity rendering of text and other elements in 3D space. Now, Slug has been made public domain and is available for anyone to use.

Slug Font Rendering Library
https://sluglibrary.com/

A Decade of Slug - Eric Lengyel
https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html




There are two methods for displaying text in 3D space: 'displaying the text as an image' and 'recalculating the text display based on font data for each frame.' Displaying text as an image has the problem of the display becoming distorted depending on the distance and angle, and recalculating for each frame also has the problem of increasing the processing load on the CPU and GPU.

Slug is a technology whose development began in 2016, designed to render fonts quickly and with high quality even on game consoles of that time. Similarly, it can also render vector images quickly and with high quality.



Slug was commercialized in 2017 and is used in a wide range of fields, including games, CAD applications, medical devices, and planetariums. Major companies that have purchased licenses for Slug include Adobe, Ubisoft, 2K Games, Activision, Blizzard, id Software, and Zenimax.



Lengyel obtained a patent for Slug in 2019, but announced on March 17, 2026, that he would be putting Slug into the public domain. Lengyel stated, 'I am convinced that the patent for Slug has already served its purpose and that holding onto the rights any further would not benefit anyone.'

Furthermore, Lengyel has made the Slug reference code available at the following link.

GitHub - EricLengyel/Slug: Reference code for the Slug Algorithm. · GitHub
https://github.com/EricLengyel/Slug



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