HUD Questions/Suggestions

chronosv2

New member
Hey there! I was wondering if it would be at all possible to allow for HUD items that reach across the screen horizontally or vertically. As it stands the maximum width or height of HUD Assets is 15. Taking memory constraints into consideration would it be possible to, for instance, allow a wider but shorter horizontal HUD or taller but thinner vertical HUD? It could be done that the HUD Assets have a maximum allowed size, for instance 128 total tiles, to keep memory usage down.

On the topic of HUDs, is there the possibility that we could set Var Tiles maximum value? For instance, picking up a Health Max upgrade or something like that? I know we have to do max health checking in the pickup, but it'd be really cool to have the unfilled tiles increase as the max allowed goes up. Numbers above 8 would be cool too but there could be reasons for that I'm not aware of yet so that might be too much to ask.

Edit: a GIF I shared to the Facebook group showing the asset tile max
 

MistSonata

Moderator
My guess is that it only goes up to 15 tiles because it puts both width and height in the same byte to save space, and since the screen is only about 30 tiles in width and height, bringing the possible number up to 128 is kinda pointless. It's possible to put each x and y size in a separate byte and use 3 of those bits for something else, but I don't know enough about how the code works to offer an alternative.
 

chronosv2

New member
Oh, I miscalculated the width. Whoops. What I was intending was max 30 (not 32, as I miscalculated) wide so you could use one asset as the entire background but that makes sense that they may have one byte to store width and height combined.
 

chronosv2

New member
Even if larger HUD Assets are out of the question, could there be a way to adjust the max number of empty boxes a VarTiles HUD object, and possibly bring the number of maximum tiles to, maybe 16?
I could certainly use two HUD items for that part but without the ability to dynamically adjust the max (even up to 8) the player would think they had a higher max than they do. A bit to hide individual HUD objects would allow you to use 2 variables with a max of 8 to do a 16-segment HP gauge.

I fully intend on coding a ways down the line, but I'm wondering if any of these things would be reasonable.
 
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