Mr. Crash McCrash

Crash Problem

Why is this crashing?


It's set so that after each of the title fades in completely, the next one is created and starts to fade in. (Need to Open with HWA version)

It crashes even in normal MMF2. Why are you using behaviors so heavily? They are meant to be used sparsely because they are much less stable than normal frame events.

EDIT: or maybe I was thinking of qualifiers, eh, sorry.

A. Wouldn't it crash in normal MMF2 since there are no Alpha bending coefficients?
B. I used behaviors because I didnt want to have all of those events to clutter the event editor. I didnt realize that they were unstable

Unless I'm mistaken, the text blitter object cannot use alpha coefficients in HWA- it is software rendered (blitted) graphics, not HWA. It still displays, but you can't use HWA effects with it or benefit from HWA efficiency- so when your code keeps trying to blend the text blitters, the blending value is buggy.

The text blitter object *does* have its own transparency function, on callbacks, which you can use instead of alpha coefficients. But bear in mind they aren't the fastest things either.



And behaviours are "stable" afaik, however it just makes your code a real circus to try to understand :) If I understand behaviours correctly, they're basically the same as pasting that code into the bottom of the event editor, more or less, in terms of both their efficiency and effects. They can make code easier to understand in some applications, and maybe thats the case for you here- I'm just used to reading through many pages of KLOC thats commented and parsed- event groups can be used to make code very easily manageable in MMF2

A. If that was the case, why does the "Bonus" Title work fine? (The first one)
B. How would I do the transparency function with callbacks?

EDIT: Found out that the problem was that some of the text blitters had teh default text (gray text with gray backgroud) Idk why that caused i to crash, but it did. It appears that HWA & Text Blitter work fine together

Its probably advisable not to tinker too much with HWA-only effects in text blitters, even if you get some to work. The callback blitted text will never update with HWA effects, and it draws using CPU in software mode anyway. I've definitely made it crash a lot in the past. But its quite stable when you stick to its normal modes.

Is there an example on how to use the callback thing?

The callback thing is a bit complicated.

Basically what it does, is that for every single character, that is, every letter in the string, it pastes that image from the tileset to the display object (blitting). So the callbacks let you insert code that executes between each character. You can have a callback on each character, or on each new line or its end, when it starts, when it ends. So it will read through the characters from left to right.

So if your string was "12345", the "on character" callback would happen 5 times.

But you can during a callback adjust what the blitter will do for that letter- you can set the source of where on the image it should copy out the character, then set the destination to where on the object it pastes it, as well as the width/height of the image it takes (it doesn't resize). You can also set the transparency for that character, but keep in mind that will be a little slower.


Its really handy not just for text blitting, but for anything graphical actually. People use it to animate characters by replacing callbacks with animation values, or people use it to display tiles in level editors and such- you can have a bunch of junk characters like "AAAAAAAAAAAA...." to generate the # of loops you wanted, and display tiled images based on that.

Hope it helps.