Questions about Chris Burrows' Active Object Text Blitter

[ffomega]

I just recently downloaded Chris Burrows' Text Blitter Engine version 3, and I must say I was very impressed by his use of a blitting effect using only an active object, a string, and a string parser. I also looked at his 3 previous tutorials and examples on basic and intermediate text blitting.

However, I had some questions regarding it:

First off, is it possible to move the text around on screen at runtime for, say, a tiny speech balloon that follows a character whiloe they move about the screen...like in Final Fantasy IX, where moving speech balloons are abundant?

Secondly, with regards to the last question, is it possible to create a background "speech balloon" behind the active objects that make up the text? I'm worried about performance issues if too many active objects appear within a screen frame at one time...since my gave has several rather large level frames using possibly hundreds of unique (also large) active objects at one time.

Finally, and this is the big mama of questions: I want to use multiple tilesets (as Chris called it in his example) within some lines of text, to emphasize certain things in the dialogue, like places and events, for example:


"This line of text has red words written within it"

I looked at the code for his text blitter engine (mach 3) to see if I could understand it....but the actual code is only briefly commented on, by which I mean he only explains what the lines of code for word wrap and blitting speed are. His comments do not point out which lines of code belong to the blitting where you can change some of the words to another color (a.k.a. "tile swapping").

I am a little confused on how to "translate" the lines of code to utilize the tile swapping within his active object. I tried to recreate what he did simply by copy-pasting into my own application, deactivating all code and reactivating one line at a time until I figured out what part(s) of the code changed the characters from one color to the next.

I'm basically confused so is there anyone who can maybe simplify the code? I'm not asking anyone to rewrite his work so I can 'cop out' of learning it....I'm just having trouble grasping his example is all...and need someone who understands it to kind of help me to understand it.

Thanks

[ChrisBurrows]

Hey man, I put together an example demonstrating the things you mentioned. The code is a little neater and condensed than before. It's barely commented, but see how you go.

Use Shift to fire the handgun, Enter to interact.

[ffomega]

Thanks Chris. I'll look at it and see if I have a better understanding of it with your simplified version

[ffomega]

[Update] I looked at the simplified code, and I have to say the articles you wrote on your site "A programmer's guide to Multimedia Fusion 2" was a bit more understandable. I am confused with the simplified example, mainly because it has no comments in it.

My main issue is trying to figure out the Loop Indexes you chose to use to change the color of text.

I created my own active object using about 8 different tilesets. In your example, you use Loop Indexes to change to the different tilesets. maybe I'm not seeing how you did it exactly, but when I try changing the Loop Indexes to different values, or if I add more LoopIndexes to check, it does not give me the result I want. Your example only uses Loop index 5 or 7.

I saw a screenshot on The Daily Click where you used about 5 different tilesets in a text blitter example but the link is broken.



That example was exactly the result I was looking to achieve, and I wanted to download it since it is fully commented, and the method you use requires HWA, which clickteam Fusion has built in.

Do you still have that example? >> http://www.create-games.com/download.asp?id=8566