What's so hard about text on the screen? in BYOND Discussion

ID:137208
 
Jan 23 2002, 1:20 am
Just wondering, why doesn't BYOND support having text output on the screen? Is it really that hard? I know that there are many bugs that they are working out right now, which is probibally why they haven't gotten around to it, but consider including it before the final version comes out :p
#1 Jan 23 2002, 1:25 am
It probably won't make it into this version, but it will be added.
#2 Jan 23 2002, 4:30 am
In response to Nadrew (#1)
In the mean time, you can use my MapText library or Ebonshadow's TalkBubble library to display text on the map.

Currently MapText is exclusive to BYONDscape subscribers, but I will soon make it public. I have a much more powerful version in the works for BYONDscape.
#3 Jan 23 2002, 6:13 am
Dreq wrote:
Just wondering, why doesn't BYOND support having text output on the screen? Is it really that hard? I know that there are many bugs that they are working out right now, which is probibally why they haven't gotten around to it, but consider including it before the final version comes out :p

The basic problem is reconciling the system of using tile-based icons to display items with a system to display larger elements like text. Text would tend to be wider than one icon in width, and usually people wouldn't want to align it on exact tile boundaries.

My suggestion for this was to read from a TrueType font (preferably including fonts distributed with the game, not necessarily installed) and create a set of icons based on another datum that controlled the attributes of the text. The /screentext datum could say what the text is, what its font and style are, what color to draw it in, etc., and a simple call to screentext.ToIcons() could generate the icons needed to display it.

Lummox JR