Output text to a window console. C++

Question

So at the moment I'm creating a basic game.

It has a background and a player character (which are both bmp's) which is being outputted to the window console successfully using the wc.Display function call.

I am curious about the method of displaying text to a window console, ie health, score, or how many lives the player has left, eg Pac-man, Pong etc. Much like how my sprite is on my game window, how would I do it for text?

I know the method of cout, but I don't think it's the same method used to display text to a game screen.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Assuming you don't actually mean console since you already know how to do a sprite but not text:

RECT where; // populate this
HGDIOBJ OldFont;
BeginPaint(hWnd, &hDC);
OldFont = SelectObject(hDC, yourfont);
DrawText(hDC, "text", 4, &where, 0);
SelectObject(hDC, OldFont);
EndPaint(hWnd, &hDC);

Answer 2

Screen oriented text i/o is not covered by the standard library's functionality.

It's very system dependent.

But, you can use a fairly portable library such as ncurses .

---

Old text terminals supported escape sequences for cursor positioning etc., and these were standardized at one point, “ANSI escape sequences”.

In Unix-land and with Windows 10 and later you can use them, but that doesn't cover single character (unbuffered) input.

So you need something like ncurses anyway.

---

For Windows you should perhaps consider wchar_t based direct console i/o via Windows API functions, in order to be able to output non-ASCII characters in general.

Answer 3

There is a specific function added into my header files which allows me to output text to the screen. I didn't not know it existed until I went searching for it. Thanks for the help guys.