Temporary solution to text-rendering problem: Screen prim

The XyText is well known for its ability to easily display and render text. Another well known fact about it is that it takes a considerable amount of primitives to support a significant amount of text.

I propose a new primitive type: screen.
This screen prim will act exactly like a cube acts, except that the number of different textures one face can display would be greater then 20. Preferably, this textures-per-face value would be tunable both width-wise and height-wise. Also, screens shouldn't support the large number of properties (cut, hollow, twist, etc) that a cube would (to provide a trade-off for the number of textures).

This would allow XyText displays with a greater chars-per-prim ratio, making everyone happy...for the time being.
==Chris

Also, a whiteboard would be nice, for business meetings.

Azelda

Aw, but then fewer would worship at the shrine of Xylor's godlike scripting skill!

EDIT: Now that I've thought about it, lets not give LL any more 'temporary' solutions, when they can spend the time working on permanent ones instead, rather than them doing 'temporary' fixes with unfulfilled promises of permanent ones going on forgotten.

Actually, the screen prim would work very plesently with Xylor's XyText scripts.

Yes, but it wouldn't seem as 'impressive' to use 'screens'.

Besides, implimenting such an idea as this one would be a step -beyond- implimenting fully 'drawable' faces on prims. It'd be adding a level of complexity, when the more permanent solution is an easier one too.

Someday, along with Image, Sound, and the new Animation upload options, we better see Font too...

Personally, I'd like to see text screens, but implemented a little differently:

Just like the current set texture setup, I'd like to see something like llSetFaceText(face, text, x, y, size, color, alpha, glow) and llClearFaceText(face)

The X and Y positions would be a semi-arbitrary grid, maybe 1cm in size.

Size would be the height of the letters in cm

Glow would be the self-illumination of the letters. At 0, they're lit just like the face. At 1, they're lit just like "light" objects. Anything in between is interpolated.

Having done this type of thing myself, I know that it's not that hard to do. It involves a bit of multi-texturing, and rendering to a texture. Considering LL's brilliant use of both, I can't see why it would be hard to implement.

And I can think of SO many uses for it!! Vehicle HUD's, text bubbles, Information displays on machines.... the possibilities are endless.

Hey, go all the way. I wanna render a webpage to a prim!!!! Imagine putting Flash onto a prim... . Or even making a cool "3d display on objects" thing like Doom 3 has. That's pretty neat.

I really want the thing that you stick in the back of your neck though...

Moleculor is right, we need REAL render-to-texture stuff, not just another hack. I would build LSL wrappers around the GD image library (which is LGPLed if I recall correctly.) I have used GD in the past for corporate web stuff (charts, graphs, etc.) and I can attest that it is a very powerful library. It does not take much logic to build a character cell API that supports colors and linefeeds and whatever else. And of course it has all kinds of drawing capabilities, like empty and filled polygons with any number of vertices.

It supports TrueType fonts, too.