Hi Guys
Here's my latest DMD Demo. After a few tips from Destruk, I have been recoding and working on efficiency. I'm getting close to something that works in real time during the game, at least for scores and quick text messages. I've made a VERY basic table in order to test it with multiball (it's not quite there yet, starts to lag a fair bit especially with big fonts).
A lot of the time was spent making the fonts. I used excel to do this, and I'll release these macros eventually too so if you have Excel yourself you will be able to create your own fonts to use in the DMD. This also allows you to convert four colour bitmap image files into the DMD format. If you type out a font in photoshop you can also import it into the system as well, as long as it sticks to the rules of being either 4,6 or 12 pixels wide. Anything other than this will run too slowly.
There are five font sizes, ranging from a tiny 4 x 6 pixel to a large 12 x 18. The larger the fonts used, the more updates for the DMD, and thus a reduction in performance.
There are also six possible 'colours' - bright, medium, dim, and then inversed bright, medium and dim. This gives a nice degree of flexibility and the option to create some simple effects such as the launch effect seen in this demo.
This new DMD uses a 2x2 pixel image with a 1 pixel gap. The result is an almost identical look to the original 3x3 but with a reasonable increase in speed.
As you will see, the system automatically puts in commas for numbers.
The command for printing numbers or text is like this:
printdmdtext (thistext,txp,typ,charset,col,ta)
where 'thistext' is the text itself
txp and typ are the x,y co-ordinates
charset is the font
col is the colour
ta is the alignment - left or right.
I'm afraid this demo is still locked as it is incomplete. I still need to tidy up the positioning and alignment of the text, which are fairly complex calculations. Once this is done, I will release this one, and hopefully some of you really clever chaps will find ways to improve the efficiency even further. I don't think we're far off with this one, but my computer is reasonably fast so feedback is most welcome.
regards
highrise
Here's my latest DMD Demo. After a few tips from Destruk, I have been recoding and working on efficiency. I'm getting close to something that works in real time during the game, at least for scores and quick text messages. I've made a VERY basic table in order to test it with multiball (it's not quite there yet, starts to lag a fair bit especially with big fonts).
A lot of the time was spent making the fonts. I used excel to do this, and I'll release these macros eventually too so if you have Excel yourself you will be able to create your own fonts to use in the DMD. This also allows you to convert four colour bitmap image files into the DMD format. If you type out a font in photoshop you can also import it into the system as well, as long as it sticks to the rules of being either 4,6 or 12 pixels wide. Anything other than this will run too slowly.
There are five font sizes, ranging from a tiny 4 x 6 pixel to a large 12 x 18. The larger the fonts used, the more updates for the DMD, and thus a reduction in performance.
There are also six possible 'colours' - bright, medium, dim, and then inversed bright, medium and dim. This gives a nice degree of flexibility and the option to create some simple effects such as the launch effect seen in this demo.
This new DMD uses a 2x2 pixel image with a 1 pixel gap. The result is an almost identical look to the original 3x3 but with a reasonable increase in speed.
As you will see, the system automatically puts in commas for numbers.
The command for printing numbers or text is like this:
printdmdtext (thistext,txp,typ,charset,col,ta)
where 'thistext' is the text itself
txp and typ are the x,y co-ordinates
charset is the font
col is the colour
ta is the alignment - left or right.
I'm afraid this demo is still locked as it is incomplete. I still need to tidy up the positioning and alignment of the text, which are fairly complex calculations. Once this is done, I will release this one, and hopefully some of you really clever chaps will find ways to improve the efficiency even further. I don't think we're far off with this one, but my computer is reasonably fast so feedback is most welcome.
regards
highrise
