At 2:48 PM -0500 1/13/06, Joseph Nastasi wrote:
I'd like some pointers on how to implement a generic text type
display that floats over a 3D scene. I got some ideas from Franks
cool overlay demo, but I'm wondering what's the best way to handle
text that will change on the fly. Looking to display real time
flight data.
That's an interesting problem. With the new Material and Texture
classes, you could replace the texture of your console object (which
could be created with AddShapeFromPicture as an easy way to build it
in code) on the fly. But converting every pixel of a large picture,
on every frame of the animation, is likely to be a performance drag.
I think this is one of those cases (all too common in 3D game
development!) where, to get good performance, you need to examine
what additional constraints you have on the problem. Surely it's not
the case that the pixels in frame N+1 are mostly unrelated to the
pixels in frame N. So what's the behavior? If new data is going to
appear on bottom, with the previous data just scrolling up like in a
Terminal window, then one solution comes to mind. If the data is
going to consist of a bunch of stationary labels with changing
values, then a different solution is called for.
So, maybe if you describe more how it should look, we can all
brainstorm some good approaches.
Best,
- Joe
--
Joseph J. Strout
joe at strout dot net
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