Making the ultimate text display

I’m sure most of you have seen a text display before, but if you haven’t, they’re pretty simple. A row of emojis that together, act as pixels and display an images. You can see some examples here:

Examples

A 3D cube outline.

A line.

I’m making this research topic because I want to find the best possible text display, capable of displaying the most colors as fast as possible. The text display I have in mind would have an API that allows you to quickly draw a circle or polygon onto it, with little to no lag so that you can render a large amount of shapes at once. If we can create a good text display and rendering API, the sky is the limit in terms of custom games.

Unfortunately, pretty much the full development of text displays has been done by me, when I’m bored, in my free time, and I want that to change. I think that a lot of the methods I’m using could be improved, which is why this has been posted here (so that people can improve them). I’m gonna detail the two methods I’ve used for my projects in the following dropdown, so that you all can see where I’ve started at and have something to base new ideas and modifications off of.

The method

Alright, so this is the current most advanced text display that’s been made, and it’s pretty simple (the bar for “most complex” is sadly rather low). The text display consists of a column of text objects, each of which display a row of emojis. The emojis I use for pixels are “:red_square::orange_square::yellow_square::green_square::blue_square::purple_square::brown_square::black_medium_square::white_medium_square:”. (Note that the Black and White squares are slightly smaller, I had to do this because all the other squares are two characters long, while the white and black large squares are only one. Using the smaller squares fixes this.) The text objects then load the emoji’s they are supposed to be displaying from a property that has been rendered from an API.

The only API I’ve ever used was a bad implementation of Bresenham’s Line Drawing algorithm. It would loop over each pixel in the line, and set the corresponding pixel in the display property. It wasn’t very fast and in my 3D renderer actually takes up the majority of the time spent showing each cube image.

The limitations of these methods- only 9 colors, only draws lines, and very slow.

So… how can we make a better text display and rendering API?

13 Likes

Great idea! I’ll definitely try some things out and come back to you! This could be somewhat revolutionary for all the pixel artists out there!

3 Likes

Wow! I like it @Blackhole927

Texts are awesome!

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are you guys gonna help or are you gonna just say wow this is cool?

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I’ll try to help later, I’m in school. ._.

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You could code a color picker, but I have no idea whatsoever on how to do this.

Could draw images too, but I have no idea on how to again like I said before.

Here are just some ideas to improve.

3 Likes

ok I read it and thats . . . confusing, but yea

<label for="favcolor">Select your favorite color:</label>
<input type="color" id="favcolor" value="#ff0000">

When code is pasted in:
Select your favorite color:

ff0000 is the color white.
If we can make this an option, where the user can type the color code in, this would solve the color problem!
Edit: This does NOT work, on here at least, this is HTML.

is that like html or smth

Yeah I think so. I searched up the code

1 Like

its refreshing seeing another device question lol

why is this Devices @Blackhole927 i also noticed that any research are in devices why?

Because it’s research.

if they have nothing to do with devices

A text is a device, you know
And Bh is researching ways to improve the text device.
Therefore research

3 Likes

Wow this is cool

2 Likes

I worked on it,

See?

1 Like

yeah this is really cool

Welcome back to the forums @Sketchy!