a few semi-related questions

hey guys, just a few things i'm wondering..

1) what is the best way to have a nice looking text box for a rpg style text box when talking in a game? I can do letter by letter talking with an edit box, but it's kind of ugly and dependant on fonts? i want an embedded/custom font and a nice looking window for the text to be written into... text blitter confuses me and seems kinda buggy.. is there an alternative?

2) i'm about to start coding in my save game system but i'm not sure if it will be compatible with other runtimes, if i save to INI now, will i have to re-do it all to make it compatible with other runtimes like iPhone/android and XNA? will iphone/xna even support saving games?

thanks!

1. Use an active and make you're own text box. For custom fonts that will look the same on all computers, use a string object for the font you want and convert it over to an active object.

Marv

If you have Dev you could try the Character Image extension. It's similar to text blitter. I've never really worked with either one but it's supposed to be better than text blitter I believe.

For the save game, as far as I know the standard ini object will always work for saving. It works with Flash and iOS, so I can't see why it wouldn't work with XNA. It's only when you use things like ini++ and the array extensions where you run into a problem. As long as you stick with regular ini you won't have compatibility problems for runtimes.

thanks for the reply, i was considering doing that.. but then it makes it kind of hard to do letter by letter text.. i think i'd rather just use actives than deal with the text blitter though..

Hopefully you aren't making images of each letter, and doing all the words/positionings yourself! I believe Marv was trying to tell you to use the string object, type the word(s) you want, and right click and Create->Active. Of course at first it won't look pretty.

But here's a trick. Make the text color white, then after making the active, copy paste the white image into the alpha channel. Then just make the whole image black!

Or you could just make a string, then have an active covering it, then make it slide off.

haha no, no! i wasn't doing that.. i meant that i wanted the sentence to appear to the player letter by letter, which is easy just using a string object but not if i want custom letters.

Cant you design fonts somehow?

It doesn't solve the font independence but Nivram has a nice letter-by-letter typing example: typewritertextexample.mfa - try page 8

I have been experimenting with (and using) Speech Bubble a lot.
It is very flexible but... no custom fonts.

Link from the tutorials page ----->

http://www.clickteam.com/website/usa/img/uploads/tutorials/download/Dialogue_tutorial.zip