OpenEuphoria

Re: How to overlay text on a full screen game ?

• Posted by Ricky <my.shangrila at gmail?com> Jun 08, 2008
• 728 views

Chris Bensler wrote:
> 
> ChrisBurch3 wrote:
> > 
> > Hi
> > 
> > On a purely theoretical level, it depends entirely on what library you are
> > using
> > to implement this.
> > 
> > There are a couple of directx libraries (exotica, exoticax, directe) which
> > have
> > examples
> > of this sort of thing
> > 
> > There's opengl, and there'e allegro - search the archives.
> > 
> > Basic principle in common with most of these libs, is that you have an area
> > of memory, which you use the required function to write the text to, then
> > you flip that (something like swap_buffers, flip etc) that area of memory
> > onto the screen memory. Its a lot faster to do it like this.
> > 
> > All gaming libs (AFAIK) have this in common.
> > 
> > Of course, if you're not talking about euphoria, then this is probably not
> > the best place for you.
> > 
> > Which library are you using?
> > 
> > Just reading your post again, are you wanting to write text onto a game that
> > has nothing to do with anything else, eg you're playing half life, and you
> > want "drop dead mf scumbag" et al to appear on the screen, put there by a 
> > separate, disparate progeam. I don't think you can do this.
> > 
> > Chris
> 
> Yes you can overlay text onto a 3rd party, full-screen app.
> Fraps does this (shows some runtime stats, such as the number of frames per
>  allows video capture) as well as other programs I know of.
> 
> How it's done exactly, I'm not sure. I think you need to aquire the address
> of the directX surface, which is a specialized windows canvas, afaik. Then you
> can use the windows text functions to write directly to the surface.
> 
> Chris Bensler
> Code is Alchemy

That's exactly what I want to do.  I will overlay some information such as frame
rate,
temperature of the graphic chip etc. on to the game Window.  The game will be
using DirectX.
In this case, it's 3DMark01 which will be using DirectX 9. This is a program for
testing graphic
card performance. Is this a simple task or very complicated?  I'm not very good
in programming.


Best regards,


Ricky