The console.

During the bootphase, DemoGL displays the console and logs all kinds of information, which can be made invisible by placing a splashscreen on the console during the bootphase (see DEMOGL_LoadingSplashEnable for details). Also during bootphase, a progress bar can be made visible, displaying the status of the bootphase (see DEMOGL_LoadingPBEnable and DEMOGL_LoadingPBSetAppearance for details).

When the bootphase is finished and application execution starts, DemoGL will hide the console, remove the splash screen and progress bar and will start the application. If no effectobject is started this will result in a black screen. The developer can bring up the console (make it visible) by pressing the TAB or '~' key.

The DemoGL console just after the start of the execution of the example application mentioned in What is DemoGL?.

The console itself contains a buffer that holds lines of text. This buffer can be much larger than the size of the console. When the buffer is larger than the amount of lines the console can display, you can scroll through the buffer by using the UP and DOWN arrowkeys and the PgUp and PgDown keys. The developer can specify the size of the console buffer, the length of the lines on screen and the amount of lines on screen, using the function DEMOGL_ConsoleSetAppearance. The background of the console is a texture stored in the directory systex and is called cnslbg.jpg. The font is stored on two textures in the same directory, with filenames: fnt_cnl.bmp and fnt_cnr.bmp. The placement of the systex directory is depending on whether the developer decides to load from a datafile (a zipped archive) or a directory. See for more details I/O Support in this About DemoGL manual.

The console can visualize system information when certain keys are pressed. Below is the list of keys currently supported in DemoGL. All keys work when the console is hidden or visible so you don't have to activate the console first.

• F1. Displays help about the supported keys on the console.
• F2. Toggles FPS counter on or off. This is an overlay at the bottom of the screen on top of all layers.
• F3. Displays all layers currently created in DemoGL, the effectobjects on those layers and if the layers are visible or not. This list is displayed on the console.
• F4. Displays all registered effectobjects on the console.
• F5. Toggles the debug overlay on or off. The debugoverlay is displayed on top of the layers visible when the console is hidden and it contains the last X lines of the consolebuffer, the current position on the timeline and when activated, a commandprompt. The amount of X is 8 by default but changable with DEMOGL_LoadingPBSetAppearance.
• F6. Toggles the input prompt on or off. This option is only available when the debug overlay is activated. The input prompt is visible in the console and in the overlay and share the same contents so typing in something on the input prompt in the debug overlay has the same effect as typing on the input prompt on the console.
• F7. Displays the complete set of defined TLE's, the current timespot on the timeline, if TLE's are executed or not, the commands plus objectnames of each TLE and all parameters specified with these TLE's. This list is displayed on the console. If you've specified a lot of TLE's in your script, be sure the console buffer can handle a lot of lines.

When the console is made visible, all effectobject execution stops, since no layers are rendered. All TLE execution continues. When a TLE is typed in on the input prompt, you have to omit the timespot parameter of the TLE so the syntax of a TLE typed in on the input prompt is:

	objectname;command;[parameter1;...parameter64;]

The information DemoGL logs on the console is prefixed with a 3 character short marker. The marker is the phase DemoGL is in when the information was logged. For developers using DemoGL this 3 character information is not important, but if you're modifying DemoGL it can be useful. See for more information about these prefixes, DemoGL system states and other related information the DemoGL sourcecode documentation that is distributed with the DemoGL v1.3 sourcecode.

A developer can log custom information on the console by using the functions DEMOGL_ConsoleLogLine and DEMOGL_ConsoleLogLineV. See the DemoGL Reference manual for more details about these functions.

Because the console is ment for developers, it should be possible to lock the keys that will bring up the console and bring up certain other overlays like the debugoverlay, input prompt and FPS counter. A developer can lock out these features by using the function DEMOGL_SetVariable to set a lock variable in DemoGL. See the DemoGL Reference manual for more details about setting variables using DEMOGL_SetVariable.