allegro_message(3)

💖 allegro_message(3) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the Allegro manual — this is allegro_message, and she's basically the "hey girl, something went wrong 😭" function of the Allegro game programming library. main character energy for error popups ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

allegro_message — used mainly to show error messages to users. Part of the Allegro game programming library. 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

#include <allegro.h>

void allegro_message(const char *text_format, ...);

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So basically this function outputs a message, and it does it using a printf() format string. iconic. Usually you wanna reach for this when you need to report messages to the user in an OS independent way — like, when some Allegro subsystem just refuses to initialise and you need to tell a human about it. 💅

⚠️ BUT — and this is the important part, no cap — you must not use this function if you are in a graphic mode. Only use it before calling set_gfx_mode(), or after a set_gfx_mode(GFX_TEXT). Respect the order, bestie. 🙈

Also, this function depends on a system driver being installed. Which means — and I'm being so serious — it won't display the message at all on some platforms if Allegro has not been initialised correctly. 💀 like, nothing. silence. the void.

On platforms featuring a windowing system, it will bring up a blocking GUI message box. If there is no windowing system, it will try to print the string to a text console, and it attempts to work around codepage differences by reducing any accented characters to 7-bit ASCII approximations. the way it just handles that for you, we love a flexible queen 👑

Example, periodt:

if (allegro_init() != 0)
   exit(1);

if (init_my_data() != 0) {
   allegro_message("Sorry, missing game data!\n");
   exit(2);
}

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• allegro_init(3)
• install_allegro(3)
• set_uformat(3)

Allegro · version 4.4.3 · allegro_message(3)

okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 💅 go forth and init your subsystems correctly, mwah 🫶💖✨