[Request] Alpha Text Object

[Pkeod]

This object acts like a normal text object by allowing text input from the developer that will be displayed, changed, or removed at runtime. However, this object would have an interface much like how the new counters are where a set of alphabetic characters are replaceable with images... such as images that have alpha-transparencies. This is to allow developers to pre-generate great looking text in programs like Photoshop and then use them in their programs.

Anyone else think something like this is needed?

[Jeff]

This would be a very cool idea.

[Joshtek]

This would be a very cool idea.

So great they made the Text Blitter object. Not sure about the alpha tho.

[Jeff]

I can envision something a bit improved over the great Text Blitter....

Text Blitter is great but having something along the lines of an counter but with images of Alpha characters might be neat.

[Sphax]

But when text blitter will support alpha channel and MMF2 filters, it will do exactly what you want no ?

Maybe an option to allow differents width for any characters can be usefule of course...

[Jeff]

I will have to go look at Text Blitter (its been a long time) but I don't think it has the internal image editor like the counter does, does it?

Like the counter where you can put in an image for 0 thru 9
A image text extension where you put in letters A thru Z

but maybe Text Blitter does it all and no one needs this.

[Pkeod]

TB can use a char map of rendered text, but it doesn't support alpha... something like how the counters deal with numbers would be easier anyway because then you don't have to worry about the offsets for the char map - and it would have to support all chars of a font such as french accents etc.

[Sphax]

I think TB must be improved for MMF2 and it will be very useful.

An option to set different characters width (or an option wich erase at display the blank pixels beetween two characters) and the support of alpha channel will make this object the better text object.

[Dines]

It would be awesomely cool if either Text Blitter were updated, or possibly if Clickteam made a Font Object (possibly based on some of their code in the Counter object?).

It would be great if it could feature an editor where you could draw characters individually, instead of within a map (this would let you set different sizes, etc), just as the Counter does. You could also use alpha maps.

What's more, you could determine which character corresponded to which ascii code.

You could use the hotspot to set an offset for individual characters (if you wanted a comic-like appearance where letters are a little wonky, or if you wanted letters all to have the same baseline, even though their heights differed)

And setting a 'horizontal space' and 'vertical space' set of vars, which can also be negative (so you can bunch letters and lines up together).

That'd be so cool!

[raytrace]

I think whoever made text blitter should split it up into seperate extensions - it is very powerful yet rather complicated to use