Text Signs

Hello,

I would like to make some signs that will appear during an automated tour of my build. I could of course use llSay(0, "Blah, blah, blah"; but that would take the tourist's eyes off of the build and down to chat and I have some animation going on so I'd like to avoid that.

I can make a texture of the text in Photoshop, put it on a transparent board, and have it appear at the appropriate times and places during the tour, and then become transparent again as the next sign appears.

Any tips or tricks for making this work well? The signs will be roughly 3 meters wide by 1 meter tall. Does the font matter? In the text tool should I choose anti-aliasing as sharp, crisp, strong, or smooth? Does it matter if I save it as a tga or png since I won't be using any transparent bits? Any suggestions for ultimate texture size?

Any other good ways to have textual information appear during a tour?

Thanks,

Doug

yes, it should be readable =)

Depends, how large will it be on screen, how much space will each letter take, how much will your texture be resized compared to it size in your photo app....

create all three, resize them down to the size it will likely be on the end users screen in SL, is it too blurry? too jaggy? if you have a nice big monitor set to a lower resolution, err on the side of jaggy (because it's likely to be more blurry on the end users screen at a higer resolution or smaller screen size


not really, assuming that the png is saved as lossless, never EVER compress images before uploading into SL. personally I'd suggest TGA for everything.


as small as possible while still maintaining the desired/neccesary quality, at the likely screen dimensions. use a power of 2 in each dimension, (because SL will convert it to one anyways if you don't), and if your size doesn't quite fit a power of two, stretch the dimension to fit (unless it's really close to the next lower limit) then shrink it back using the objects size.


a prim with llSetText via script will create hover text of you choice, which you could build into you tour vehicle, and change/hide dynamicly