[lcd4linux] LCD4WoW

[Scott S. <sis...@gm...>]

It's kind of poor quality. LCD simulations in World of Warcraft.
http://www.youtube.com/user/sflynn2012#p/a/u/0/B5zQhRo7rN0

What I did here is I extended your layering scheme to character displays and
made the space character the alpha channel. You totally need to do that in
LCD4Linux. Hey, Linux is getting more popular among geeks. Maybe I'll spark
some interest for LCDs. I'm making large chunks of the game's information
available and visualized on some surface. I've done the tooltip driver and
the Text module for StarTiip, which is basically a driver. I'm working on a
graphical simulation of a character display at the moment. You don't want to
get too big with these though. I'll likely have to put in hard coded limits.

Also, I wanted to mention that your graphical display design, which is
updated in realtime, will be a whole lot lighter if done with a single
repeating timer, so widget:Draw() only updates the frame buffer. The entire
display is redrawn at every refresh interval. I'm about to do that to
character displays as well, and make it configurable. Either the player can
have it update in real time or they can have it update on a refresh timer.

I want to encourage you to work on LCD4Linux. If not but to write some
drivers for the latest hardware, find room to make a release. I'm going to
see if I can spark interest in LCDs and Linux. :) I can have this at least
mature-beta by the next expansion later this year. I want to see players
sharing displays over addon communcations. You just send a serialized
version of the display's configuration (including layouts and widgets) to
another player and they see your best presentation. Or you can receive a
upload request from another player and you choose to accept the display or
not.

Also, I'm going to bug you about the fact that LCD4Linux's character display
is so weighed down by the bars code. You can't add widgets without
containing the growing segments of a bar widget. Instead of allocating space
for all icons, allocate space for bars, and allocate space for each icon.  I
know that the character displays are a thing of the past, but I still used
it in LCD4WoW, since it's lighter to simulate a character display (with no
special characters) than it is a graphics display. A 256x64 cell graphic
display would cripple WoW. I'm getting by right now with a 1x20 sized
simulation of a 7x8 character display. Write a character display simulation
for LCD4Linux. :) You can have all the special characters you want.

http://imgur.com/uNDQFl.jpg

- Starlon