Advanced Display Block

[Valiant70]

This could be either a modification of the current display block with an expanded GUI to support the new features, or a different block with expanded capabilities.

Logic interaction: Logic input toggles the screen on or off. Combined with the other capabilities, this can be used to make a "changing" display.

Settings:

• X, Y, and Z displacement: move the screen relative to its default position
• X, Y, and Z rotation: rotate the screen relative to its default position
• Background visibility: toggle whether the square background of the screen is visible (it may be uneeded or in the way - this increases the block's flexibility)

So how does this make a changing display?
Just place as many displays as you want (perhaps behind a wall), move their screens to the same location, and toggle them off or on individually with your logic contraptions! You could have one with a visible background and two or three different overlays without a background for example.

 

[nightwalker_007]

I've thought about this too. It would be nice to turn on logic in your ship or base, and have displays come to life letting you know what's happening inside the base.

A better option would be to tie the existing displays to a scriptable computer that would be able to control the text.

Another thing I'd like to see is being able to link multiple displays together to become one display unit, allowing for more text to be placed on the screen and treat a 4x4 or 4x6 display as a single block. Having a display that can flip between pages of text would be nice, like a base welcome message alternating with a base status display or something.

The other problem with displays and text is that the text size is inconsistent depending on what screen resolution and system you connect from. This really needs to be fixed (switch to a custom fixed-width pixel font would be perfect.)

 

[alterintel]

I like the logic idea as well. It would be cool if the displays could be touch screen as well. It would be cool if you could control logic directly from the display as well. Not sure how it would be implemented though.

 

[Valiant70]

I've thought about this too. It would be nice to turn on logic in your ship or base, and have displays come to life letting you know what's happening inside the base.

A better option would be to tie the existing displays to a scriptable computer that would be able to control the text.

Another thing I'd like to see is being able to link multiple displays together to become one display unit, allowing for more text to be placed on the screen and treat a 4x4 or 4x6 display as a single block. Having a display that can flip between pages of text would be nice, like a base welcome message alternating with a base status display or something.

I like the logic idea as well. It would be cool if the displays could be touch screen as well. It would be cool if you could control logic directly from the display as well. Not sure how it would be implemented though.

Combining all of this into one block might be hard, especially combining a movable screen with conjoining screens. Maybe instead of conjoining screens just merging, several display blocks could be slaved to one. That would remove the screens from the slaves and make the master larger and provide it with more available characters and lines. Then the master could have its screen moved and rotated as before.

Making display modules a peripheral for scriptable computers is an interesting idea. Allowing a computer to change text, position, and such sounds great! A touch screen sounds very difficult to implement, although I really like the idea.