No way to rotate text with LUA engine + draw_text for vertical games?

[buffis]

See screenshot:
https://i.imgur.com/69IIczu.png

The draw_text API doesn't seem to have any support for rotating the text.

Tested with rom bbakraidja

[angelosa]

fwiw it's not "vertical" games only, it's really anything that doesn't have ROT0 as screen orientation, example splatterj (ROT180):

emu.pause()
s = manager.machine.screens[":screen"]
s:draw_text(40, 40, "Hey I am upside down")

[h0tw1r3]

Would it make sense if these functions drew on the ui layer instead of the "screen"? Then presumably the rotation becomes a non issue.

[cuavas]

Allowing Lua to draw to the UI container is not as simple as you might hope.

[cuavas]

@h0tw1r3 this has been at least partially addressed by 8ab63e2. It’s now possible to draw to render containers directly (see Lua reference for render container). This allows you to draw text “right way up” when the emulated screen is rotated. Note that render container coordinates are normalised (0,0)-(1,1) for the window/screen area, which may not correspond directly to the screen area due to aspect ratio differences or layouts. There’s still no way to explicitly draw rotated text.

Here’s a quick and dirty example that works at the console:

ui_ctnr = manager.machine.render.ui_container
lineheight = manager.ui.line_height
function overlay()
   ui_ctnr:draw_text('center', 1 - (2 * lineheight), 'hello\nfrom Lua', 0xffffffff, 0x66666666)
end
emu.register_frame_done(overlay, "frame")

Using this with Super-X (superx – a vertical screen game):

Note that anything from Lua drawn to the UI container will draw over UI elements, including menus. You can check menu_active to avoid drawing over menus if you like.

[h0tw1r3]

Confirmed. Works as described.

For others reading this, the UI is not included in a :snapshot or :video_recording (which my use case requires).