On 13-Jan-06, at 5:20 PM, Joseph J. Strout wrote:
At 4:13 PM -0500 1/13/06, Joseph Nastasi wrote:
I should have been clearer... It will probably be an overlay that
has a set of properties listed in a label: value pair. The actual
number of properties can change, but not in real time; they would
be selected in a window at another time.
OK, then let's see... it seems to be mostly a numeric display, so
one option would be to create a TriMesh that has a separate little
pair of triangles for each digit to be shown. Attach to this a
texture that has all ten digits in a strip. Then, at runtime, you
can show any digit in any position by just setting the UV
coordinates of the appropriate triangles. This is a bit of work to
code, but it would be blazing fast because you're not changing the
texture (image) at all, and yet the whole display (or at least, the
changing parts) is still one object.
I have code that does exactly this, but it's built on top of the
Quesa Wrappers. It shouldn't be *too* difficult to port it to use the
built-in Trimesh/Material however. If anyone wants this please
contact me off list, but note that it uses fixed-width glyphs and
only supports the standard ASCII character set (1-127).
It's also not as "blazing fast" as you might expect because bitmap
fonts tend to require alpha channels, and that means the mesh is
sorted and drawn triangle-by-triangle inside Quesa. A few lines is
ok, a whole page is so-so. Updating the trimesh can also be a
bottleneck due to all the accessor methods required to hack at UVs/
verts one at a time.
Frank.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Open Source RB Goodies and Shareware
<http://developer.chaoticbox.com/>
<http://www.chaoticbox.com/>
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode:
<http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/>
Search the archives of this list here:
<http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
|