Its never too late to finish something since this post of 2011! a lot of time has passed and interest have moved, but its always comfortable to get back the old rig and play around some holes you never filled.
Based on the library OutlineText by Shao Voon Wong that draws text with outlines and transformations, recovered some chunks of code from first version and made a (semi)complete Object Plugin from it.
I was developing another object that will be published soon, working with ir sdk is quite limited on the DesignTime IDE, i mean, native objects looks good on settings panel, but objects not. Overcoming those probles is a bit tricky as i had to follow all the calls from ams to plugin to determine better way to replace the settings panel, in this case with external WinForms .net control that wont be shipped in release, so designer stuff is separated from runtime stuff, being much more convenient. Also looking much better
This is highly experimental and could break, in fact it has some issues redrawing, but they are more refered to this particular plugin by its graphic pipeline so it can stay as it is, im more interested on the other plugin, but doing this served as good learning, and finished long time abandoned project.
Apart from limited api, ams object plugins are way limited by the way the data is stored and passed, so also had to overcome this using windows crypto lib to encode and decode data from base64 to unicode utf16-le and vice versa, so this plugin can use any weird language you speak (probably, dont expect 4byte unicodes like emojis to work)
So a bit more of work than ive expected on this, but result is kinda cool. From now, customization can be only made from designer and plugin dont have any lua methods, it could be added but i saw no point on doing this. Also some features could be added like bitmap masks for text using images, or better control of the font, rotations etc could be applied, so im (as always) putting full source code on a repository and inviting anyone to contribute: https://bitbucket.org/pabloko/outlinete ... rc/master/
Based on the library OutlineText by Shao Voon Wong that draws text with outlines and transformations, recovered some chunks of code from first version and made a (semi)complete Object Plugin from it.
I was developing another object that will be published soon, working with ir sdk is quite limited on the DesignTime IDE, i mean, native objects looks good on settings panel, but objects not. Overcoming those probles is a bit tricky as i had to follow all the calls from ams to plugin to determine better way to replace the settings panel, in this case with external WinForms .net control that wont be shipped in release, so designer stuff is separated from runtime stuff, being much more convenient. Also looking much better
This is highly experimental and could break, in fact it has some issues redrawing, but they are more refered to this particular plugin by its graphic pipeline so it can stay as it is, im more interested on the other plugin, but doing this served as good learning, and finished long time abandoned project.
Apart from limited api, ams object plugins are way limited by the way the data is stored and passed, so also had to overcome this using windows crypto lib to encode and decode data from base64 to unicode utf16-le and vice versa, so this plugin can use any weird language you speak (probably, dont expect 4byte unicodes like emojis to work)
So a bit more of work than ive expected on this, but result is kinda cool. From now, customization can be only made from designer and plugin dont have any lua methods, it could be added but i saw no point on doing this. Also some features could be added like bitmap masks for text using images, or better control of the font, rotations etc could be applied, so im (as always) putting full source code on a repository and inviting anyone to contribute: https://bitbucket.org/pabloko/outlinete ... rc/master/
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