Set text trunicated and coloring problems

[Turokhan Legion]

Hi Guys,

I am creating a tool that scans for objects and avatars etc but am struggling to overcome the limits.

They are:

1. Trunicating text when displaying lots of information.
2. Changing colors of seperate lines

Now i know this can be done on a single prim because a product called emDash currently does this. Each line shows a different color of text depending on the criteira and the text is never trunicated no matter how much data is displayed.

Any ideas, this one is baffling me.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

Hover text on a prim set with llSetText has a limit of 254 bytes UTF-8. UTF-8 uses between 1 and 4 bytes for each character so you will get up to 254 characters but less if you use characters outside the ASCI set (i.e. the latin character set used in English and other western European languages). And you can only have one colour at a time.

If you are seeing something that goes beyond that limit it either uses multiple prims which may be hidden or it isn't using this kind of text. Are you sure emDash is one prim. Buttons on a hud are usually prims which would be about 18 looking at the picture of it.

Take a look at this: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/XyzzyText

or it could be html using media on a prim (MOAP) see the quick start section on this page http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Void_Singer/Teacup

Another common strategy is to "scroll" the text. You make the text appear to scroll by removing the top line and adding a new line at the bottom.

 

[Turokhan Legion]

The fact that it detects avatars and that list is forever changing, i cant see how theyve used mulit prims to account for this. It has to be on a single prim..

[Rolig Loon]

The only way to get different colors on different lines is to use more than one text generator in more than one prim. It takes a bit of manipulation, and it's much easier to do it convincingly in a HUD. There you only have two dimensions to worry about.  We've all tried various tricks over the years, but the limitations that Ohjiro described are exactly what LSL offers.  Creating text that changes continually is the easy part, since you can update it as fast as you can run a timer.  It's also easy to make a scrolling marquee tto overcome the length limits, as in https://community.secondlife.com/t5/LSL-Library/Float-Box-Contents/m-p/753805 or https://community.secondlife.com/t5/LSL-Library/Marquee-Style-Texture-Display/m-p/1701543

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

This is a hud with 4 prims on the back and the hover text shows through the front prim so it looks like text on the hud.

 

[Cerise Sorbet]

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Turokhan Legion wrote:

The fact that it detects avatars and that list is forever changing, i cant see how theyve used mulit prims to account for this. It has to be on a single prim..

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OK, you've been around a while, so I can see why you're incredulous. The bad old days when doing this would have involved ink messages and a script in every prim are behind us. A few years ago PRIM_TEXT was added to llSetLinkPrimitiveParams and friends, so doing this isn't madness any more.

[Turokhan Legion]

Thanks for all the input guys. Turns out that this is a multiprim item...

Damn linden and their archaic limits lol.

One would of thought that these limits would be increase as technology advances, oh well