Gradient String Builder

Hello all,

If you've ever seen the intro for Madoshi's tower defense, (props on a great tower map btw), you've prolly thought, man what a neat text gradient. Thanks to the heavy Anti-Ailiasing that the WC3 engine does to its text, any use of vivid color really comes out strong.

Well, Iv'e coded some manually for my first map, and i can tell you that its not fun, heh, especially when you forget a value! So heres a program that will make gradients for you.

(As a bonus it also outputs HTML).

Let me know if you find any bugs (I always get reallllllly suspicious when the program works right the first time P)

So here are some notes....

1) I set it up to transition from different alpha values, but none of those seem to have an effect on the window text or the leaderboard text, so im actually wondering if thats even worth leaving in there?

2) Can anyone enable HTML for this post so i can display some of the gradients as an example? I cant use vB code, (at least i think), unless theres some tag that takes values other than "fuscia" and "lightblue" or whatever, hehe.

3) I think that it would be wise to limit the gradients to just one line of text. Im pretty sure that trying to do a whole paragraph will cause some problems, so use it sensibly.

4) If anyone has some other formats (no matter how obscure they might be), send me an email at [email protected], with the format specs and ill be sure to add it ASAP.

5) This only goes from one color to another as it is, however if you wanted to set it up to go from red to green to blue, you would simply run it from red to green, and then from green to blue and append the second set of code to the first.

6) I like to make attractive gui's, so if any of you systems programmers give me any flack about my "pretty" program you'll have a brawl on your hands ;)

7) Source code is available in Visual Basic, (i can just paste the routine up here in VB or Psuedocode if anyones curious).

Thats it! I hope this thing is helpful to you! And not completely buggy :P

Jason

When using auto-timed messages to players, the game bases the amount of time to display the text upon the length of the raw string its fed, instead of what actually gets formatted.

So as a result, even if your gradient is just one line, it will stay up there for a considerable amount of time. Use a manually timed message instead.

(oh and thanks to whoever moved this, I had it in the wrong form :P)