{"id":135,"date":"2023-08-13T17:23:57","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T17:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.scummvm.org\/hsk\/?p=135"},"modified":"2023-08-16T18:58:08","modified_gmt":"2023-08-16T18:58:08","slug":"reading-books-in-total-distortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scummvm.org\/hsk\/2023\/08\/13\/reading-books-in-total-distortion\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Books in Total Distortion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings everybody! Just before we start, I have something to tell you all, It’s about time and we are in the final phases of GSoC ending, the final mentor evaluation is about to happen (2 weeks~) and unfortunately, that means my tenure will be coming to an end! With that being said let’s start with my work this week! (plus what has been merged)<\/p>\n

This week I have worked on fixing more bugs and improve more support, let’s start with the title!<\/p>\n

Reading Books in Total Distortion!<\/h3>\n

Linked to https:\/\/trello.com\/c\/ZMRuRYA0\/632-index-books-overflow<\/a> where in books library the index in book was overflowing (see image)<\/p>\n

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bad (or bugged) render of books<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, like any good sensible developer I took it upon myself to fix this issue! To do that I have to investigate, that how this thing is different from other “texts” in Director.. and I found that:<\/p>\n

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Style: Scrolling <\/em>and that’s it! The difference was that this “text cast” has this style “Scrolling”, which was giving issues as in ScummVM we didn’t implement “Scrolling” textcast! You might have been confused about one thing: What is “Cast?” or “Text Cast” here??<\/p>\n

Well a cast is like an element of movie, it is like the building blocks of any game\/multimedia in director engine, and among these elements, we have many different kinds, for example Image cast, text cast, filmloop (series of frames), digital-video etc etc. Now each of these building blocks can have properties, like here TextCast member has this property of Style, where we can choose what kind of cast that is!<\/p>\n

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The Cast terms originally coined right after movies<\/p>\n

e.g. it is one of the actors in a movie, you put it on a Frame, and Frames compose a Score
\n~ sev, (#engine-director, discord server)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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So as I have previously mentioned, there is only simple text cast implemented in ScummVM, therefore, what I had to do is to simply implement a scrolling cast member! One\u00a0 that takes into account a scrollbar in side and the logic to click items in it!<\/p>\n

Well to do that, I just reused the TextScrollingWindow (ie a special kind of window specially created for displaying text in mac styled windows), well I had to do this because of scrollbar, that I needed in order to implement this scroll behaviour! Now as a part of doing this, what I was basically doing is to reuse the code that was written for text display, google says about code reuse:<\/p>\n

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Code reuse aims\u00a0to save time and resources and reduce redundancy<\/b> by taking advantage of assets that have already been created in some form within the software product development process.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
and that serves about right! I could have simply written everything into default text class (which was used to mactexts) however the thing is, to do that I have to add scrollbar, its render, then event functions.. basically all of these were there in textwindow itself, so why do that all again when all you can do is to reuse it!<\/div>\n
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and that is how, after fixing it up, and making more changes to make it work properly, here’s the final result:<\/div>\n
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