Any way to render text onto a prim?

Hi there,

I've read through the FAQs and forum and did not see the asnwer to my question, so sorry if this is a dupe. I am interested in programatically rendering text on a prim, to build a dynamic 'console' or 'board'. I know how to build it if I need to but was wondering if there is some call I am missing that can project text onto the prim. Many thanks for any insight.

Can't remember the exact name of it but it's in the wiki.

"XY-Text"?
by Xylor someone.

how's that for vague.

Basically you take a texture that has all the letters of the alphabet on it and programmatically move it around so that only one letter shows at a time. Then you need a row of prims to display it on. Slow and resource intensive by all accounts, but it works.

Thanks Jeremy, thats what I was thinking. The initial build of the object will be heavy, but hopefully I can just switch the textures to update the text on the tiles I provisioned and not suffer as much a performance hit.

Yes, it's called XYText. It lets you put up to 6 characters on a single prim, as long as you don't mind the prim being squashed flat. It's designed to allow several prims to be "chained" together, so you just pass whatever string you want and it works out which prims should be showing which parts of it.

You can get the scripts and more information in the wiki

Just noticed a 10 character one too, which I haven't played with.

Well, I created a prim that rezzes a matrix of tiny prim objects I called digiboxes, kind of like the board on wheel of fortune (wheres vanna anyway?). I could then set the texture to the asci character image, and get almost a 'train board' effect. This might be useful for 'tickers', but because of the number of prims needed, this is not feasible for a full console. Temp prims are no good, because they die too quickly and re-rezzing the matrix all the time is too much in my book.

I will try the method in the wiki. Thanks Stephen and Jeremy.

Thanks Stephen!

I can imagine a way to create a newsticker of sorts with 6 prims and a single script only, but 40 tiny textures for the 26 letters + numbers 1-0 + punctuation (.,!').

Those images are permanently displayed on 5 box prims with a profile cut, which gives you 8 sizes per prim, enough to display all 40 textures and force every client around to load them. The 5 boxes are only needed for image preload, so they can have a high transparency, a tiny size or be hidden inside another prim.

The 6th prim handles the text display and only needs a single script. It moves along one axis on a fast timer and displays the letter textures as particle effect. Every 0.5 sec. timer cycle could display multiple particle letters. The displayed line of text is constantly repeated, to kep the particles alive.

The text could be stored on a notecard, perhaps vertically written to keep the script load down and read every letter as a single line, or every letter followed by a separator to store a whole line in a list variable.

I wouldn't want to script it myself; I have not much of a clue of particle effects and hate everything that forces me think too much but I think this would react much faster to dynamic text changes than XyText, at the price of constant script load on the sim. The number of total letters would also be more variable. You could duplicate the single display prim for a second line and theoretically create a whole page of text, although I wouldn't want to do that to a sim (number of displayed particles is also limited). Well, it's only an idea that just jumped at me without much of a warning.

/Edit: using the same texture for 0 and O as well as I and 1 would allow two more letters without needing more "texture preload" prims. Perhaps a + or & sign and a $.

Check the International Learning Center (ILC). They run a class on how to make a digital clock, and before the build you learn text on a prim.
Sorry, I know search isn't working, but if you IM me when I am in world, I will give you a landmar,