I think vertical scrolling text and alphablended layers are both useful. A lot in the library has changed with 4.0, so it won’t be so easy to merge your changes in. I’m not planning to improve the legacy Background/Scrolling/Indexed layers - the only layers that were in SmartMatrix Library 3.0 - new features will be going into the “GFX” layers, based on Adafruit_GFX.
Details:
If porting those features over to the GFX layers is too much work, if you even just want to share your modified SmartMatrix 3.x files, I can do a diff and port those features over to the GFX when I get back to working on SmartMatrix Library again.
I’ve been focusing lately on making improvements to the WLED project as it has a lot of great support for controlling LEDs with patterns through a UI and support for many different APIs, but needs help adding support for 2D and driving a lot of pixels with high quality graphics efficiently. Some more details here:
It’s a project worth checking out now with the caveat that the current built in patterns are underwhelming. The upcoming 0.12 release will make it much more appealing with a lot of user friendly changes like being able to choose what type of LEDs and what pins to drive from the UI (instead of #defines
). Better patterns and 2D support in the main branch will come in the future.