Help with Score Tags

The plan is to get a score to appear in place of a destroyed object - by just writing it on a textured sprite or quad and fade it over a period of 2-3 secs.

I need to write to the texture, in game, as the score could be between + or - ( 100 to 10000)points, so I can't just make an anim texture and load it with alpha flag.

It's all quite easy to do ( in theory!!) but the problem I'm having is that every time I write a score to a texture I need to then call some form of alphamask routine so that it displays right and I can fade it properly.

I want to just be able to write the score to the texture and viola?! Is there any quick way around this.

Cheers
Stevie

A method I would try would be to have an image containing digits 0-9 and then copyrect the required digits onto the texture. Not sure how fast this would be as it would require 5 copyrects to create the 10000 points texture. However, the copyrects will only need to be pretty small so I would be surprised if this method was too slow.

I don't think there is a way to access the alpha channel of an image in blitz, but you could have the digits 0-9 precreated with alpha, and use that as a texture, then adjust the u/v coords to create the right sequence of digits. (I think).

Oooh, you mean have a set of 5 quads, each textured with the 0-9 texture and then adjust the UVs (only need to alter the U, I think) to show the correct digit?

Thats a neat idea! ;)

Yes, that's what I mean, but he would need 6 quads since it can vary from +/- 10000 :)

I thought you could reassign the texturebuffer... I saw a code snip that was freeware out there like this:

tex3=CreateTexture(128,128)
SetBuffer TextureBuffer(tex3)
Color 127,127,127
Text 0,0,"DEAD!"
SetBuffer BackBuffer()

In the particle engine I use this creates a sprite of words... I am not sure exactly how but there is no other code to manage it and the image is only the words...

Just showing what I use... Probably no help!

Good ideas - thanks. I'm keen to just have one quad though - a bit too much faffing around for such a simple think.

Big& - I would probably just drawblock / image instead of copyrect the numbers - should be fastest?

I know I can use additive blend but then I can't fade it. I think this is probably what the particle engine is doing - unless you care to share?

Unless there's a way to fade an additively blended texture without changing the colour every frame?

I myself would be interested in that too!!!

Possibly - I'm not too familiar with alot of 2D commands. :)



I think just ramping down the EntityAlpha to 0 will work.

[edit] forget that - you probably need something that works in a single surface system.