T w e n t y S i d e d

I have no less than a week’s worth of posts sitting in the queue, in much the same way that wet leaves might sit in your downspout, preventing efficient operation. All of them need that once-over in different places to weed out different places where I re-use words and the bad sentence structure in different places.

Next week I’m going to put up my long-delayed survival horror posts up for Halloween, so some of these posts will be stale by the time we reach them. Which do you prefer, unfinished, or irrelevant? No worries, I can do both!

I should have spent tonight (Thursday) on Friday’s noontime post, but instead I got caught up in a side project…

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I build my comics using a homebrew program I came up with. It lets me throw down word bubbles and drag the tails around and generally do stuff that would be tedious and time consuming if done by hand.

But for months I’ve been irritated at how long it takes to update a bubble. When I type text into the dialog box, it takes a full second for the program to rebuild the bubble. This makes editing really annoying. At the heart of the problem are the Windows API calls I’m making. I draw the text into an off-screen Bitmap using common Windows text-drawing calls. The same ones used to draw the tooltips and menus in front of you right now if you’re on a Windows machine. But for whatever perverse reason, Windows takes preposterous amount of time to give me the data.

It goes like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “GetBitmapBits ()”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.