Look in to using SetFrom[Whatever] functions for updating layers

[ghost]

It looks as though it's possible to do this:

<Layer Type="BitmapText" UpdateCommand="%SetFromMyFunction" />

And then you have a function:

function SetFromMyFunction(actor) [some logic] actor:settext(whatever) end

This would make everything so much neater in the xml as all the logic could be moved in to lua scripts (where they should really be)