On Sat, 9 Dec 2006 23:43:20 +0000
Stuart J Urquhart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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.
Nice idea :)
> 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"?
Yep many function have poor names, those come from scummvm. What about
roomPrint() ? Even more explicit imho.
> 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();
Acctualy the dott scripts always do that. Somehow i suspect their compiler
probably had some abstraction around that.
> 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");
With ScummVM that's definitly true. However i don't remember off-hands
how the original VM react to that.
> 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.
If you know nothing else can change the state inbetween then that's
allright (at least with scummvm).
> 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".
That's right.
> 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?
Send a patch to give these functions better names :)
Albeu
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