Hey again,
I have recently been playing about with printing strings in SCUMM.
Specifically, i wanted to print the names of locations the mouse
moves over (slightly offset from the mouse position), much like what
happens in the monkey island map view.
I wasn't quite sure where to begin, so i started off using the
"cursorPrint" function, which worked. However, the strings seemed to
be getting directly printed onto the room graphic, which of course
not quite what i wanted.
After a bit of debugging, i found out that the function i should have
been using is "print", which according to scummvm prints onto the
text surface, and thus will be cleared properly.
I was a bit disappointed that the "cursorPrint" function had a very
misleading name. Perhaps a better one would be "stampPrint", since it
pretty much has the effect same effect as "stampObject"?
Another thing which i noticed was the "printBegin" & "printEnd"
functions (sub-ops 0xFE & 0xFF in scummvm). "printBegin" loads the
default settings to use to print the string, and "printEnd" saves them.
Looking at the wiki docs, it says "Start / End a print context",
which would lead me to believe that there is some complex context
system regarding printing strings in SCUMM, perhaps involving some
batching system. So i might be tempted to do this every time i wanted
to print a string:
printBegin();
print("Something");
printEnd();
Which would essentially be a waste of a function call, as "printEnd"
will just save the defaults that were loaded by "printBegin" (a
pretty redundant operation). So i could reduce that to:
printBegin(); // i.e. load default values
print("Something");
Which would have an additional effect of sounding odd, i am
"beginning" a new print context, but i am never "ending" it. But
still, it is more valid than the above example. Last but not least, i
could of course only call "print", assuming i didn't care about
ensuring the settings were in a sane state.
I guess my main gripe about "printBegin" and "printEnd" functions is
that they aren't named very well. They don't give a good indication
on what operation they will really perform, which is merely just
saving and restoring settings for each category of print operation.
If they were named something different, lets say "printRestoreState"
and "printSaveState", one could easily associate "State" with the
settings of the string that can be set (via "printAt", "printMumble",
etc), and the corresponding operation being "Restore" or "Save".
I think that's all i have to say on printing strings. My solution
seems to be working nicely for the moment - anyone else have any
ideas or suggestions regarding string printing?
Regards
-SJU
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