I am currently working on "techno-babble screens". Here is an example of what I have:
[attachment=18587:testImage.png]
It is made with an off-screen render target that I write text and sprites to with some animation.....
Does anyone have any tips on how to make it more "busy"????
Make the text move so keep adding lines, maybe with different color text or commands, but generally movement on these screens will make them look busier than they are :).
Make the text move so keep adding lines
The text is actually a segment of code in the game. I have 180 lines of it that scrolls up the screen. The bar graphs randomly go up and down.
I like the suggestions. I just don't want to put so much stuff that it takes up too many processor cycles.....
Posted Today, 06:11 PM
Scanlines
What do you mean by "scanlines"?
I have the "wireframe model" already-- it's just for another screen.
How would you do a popup window?
If you *really* don't want to put too much CPU into these screens, you can always just pre-render your stuff offline.
E.g. you can render lots of source code into a small texture ( e.g. using a 3x4 sized font, you can fit 256x256 characters into an 1024x1024 texture ), and the same with hexdumps. You can write a smaller piece of code rendering some randomgenerated mesh and highlighting some vertices on it, adding a few bits of random text at the left side ( just make the line-lengths feel natural, it looks weird when there's too much difference in linelengths ), make your animation loopable and then pre-render it into images. I'd suggest low framerates.
Voi'la, you now have lots of screens rendering simple textures. Heavier on memory, lighter on CPU. Of course, you can use hybrid approaches too.
You might want to decrease the saturation on the babble screen or something. Right now it looks good, but it looks like it's actually part of the scene (instead of a screen in the scene). Scanlines would help, as would making it monochrome. (Google for "scanline effect" to see what people mean by scanelines).
Scrolling the target texture on the render - if the content isnt readable the same static (multi page) texture could be reused and 'varied' a bit by x and/or y flopping the texture coords, changing the scaling/colors/window onto the texture/flashing , etc.... Different overlays of graphs and thingees to the side.
