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[metamorphium]

Hi,

just a quick question. What is a preffered way to create a large text entities eq. books, manuscripts, etc?

I am now thinking advantages of live text against images and vice versa.

If live text how would you handle "typesetting". Well, maybe the images for each page are the best thing but then,
load it and hide / show pages (with some animation) or make changescene with custom changescene animation?

Thanks in advance for tips.

[Mnemonic]

Well basically you have two options: use the static GUI controls or images with pre-rendered text. Both approaches have their pros and cons. If you use texts, the localization and text changes in general are easirer. On the other hand, if you use images you have better control of the text, you can add various fonts, images etc. more easily then by scripting the page layout in WME. So I'd say, for simple texts without any fancy effects use static controls, otherwise use images.

[organican]

I'd say the biggest advantage with text is if you have lots of it.
Size DOES matter... (at least in MB on a 56 or 28 connection...)

On the other hand... how do you do with pictures in books and such?

One idea is to have a text built from several entities, like six on one page
and then you can choose if they have to be text or images.

Oh how messy this is... I can see why the pre-rendered hand-made 16th century manuscript is waaay cooler and simpler. At least providing the user can find a time machine....

[metamorphium]

I'd say the biggest advantage with text is if you have lots of it.
Size DOES matter... (at least in MB on a 56 or 28 connection...)

On the other hand... how do you do with pictures in books and such?

One idea is to have a text built from several entities, like six on one page
and then you can choose if they have to be text or images.

Oh how messy this is... I can see why the pre-rendered hand-made 16th century manuscript is waaay cooler and simpler. At least providing the user can find a time machine....

And the next think is typesetting. Windows text functions looks unusable for book-like typesetting. So it's not believable at all if you use "live text". It all the time strikes me when I see books in games with such a text. It's not about font but about the actuall typesetting. Hey mnemonic, wouldn't you want to integrate TeX in some way. LOL (Just a joke)

Size is not an issue because we are more considering how many CD roms the game will be than if it will be downloadable.

[organican]

I wrote a longer reply that I accidentally deleted... It was cool... the professor and bender was in it and all..

But anyway...

(do you remember btw how this was made in MI3 with the recipes??)

I came up with another cool idea...
To have the different races and people in a game speak in different fonts... like elfish and alienese...
_I_ don't need it myself at this hour, but some people might find it interesting...
What's your thought, Mnemonic, can this be done, easily,
like aliens speaking in a strange font till you learn their language..
And fairies language looking like flowers, and a murderers font being bloody...
can this be done? It's quite a cool idea I have here actually...
What do you say
(of course I will be using this if I have the chance, it's really interesting,
adding character and personality to people and things...
I believe we have a winner...)

[vatre]

To have the different races and people in a game speak in different fonts... like elfish and alienese...

Excerpt from WME help:

Code: [Select]

ACTOR
{
  NAME = "MyActor"
  CAPTION="My brand new actor"
  X = 100
  Y = 100
  SCALABLE = TRUE
  INTERACTIVE = FALSE
  COLORABLE=TRUE
  ROTATABLE = FALSE
  SOUND_PANNING=TRUE
  SCRIPT="actors\MyActor\MyActor.script"
  FONT = "fonts\outline_red.font"

Description:
NAME - the internal name of the actor
CAPTION - actor's caption
X, Y - the initial position
SCALABLE - whether the actor is affected by the scene scaling
INTERACTIVE - whether the actor appears to be interactive (it reacts to mouse events)
COLORABLE - whether the actor is affected by the scene coloring
ROTATABLE - whether the actor is affected by the scene rotation definition
SOUND_PANNING - specifies whether all the sounds generated by this actor are automatically panned depending on his position on screen
SCRIPT - the script assigned to this actor (there can be multiple SCRIPT lines)
FONT - the font to be used for actor's speech subtitles

As you can see, you've got the font property that you define for an actor. I guess the same goes for entities. Actually, I am not too excited about this. I was hoping that I could have one speech font for all the actors and entities, and just change the color, but this way I will have alot of font files with manually colored fonts... Well, what can one do.

[Mnemonic]

You can also change the font at runtime using the SetFont() method. I have seen the trick with a different fonts for aliens somewhere... I believe it was in Anachronox, or am I mistaken?

[organican]

> Posted by: vatre
>Insert Quote
>Quote from: organican on Today at 12:10:34 AM

>To have the different races and people in a game speak in different fonts... like elfish and alienese...

>Excerpt from WME help:
...

I forgot. Read first, and ask LATER.

> Posted by: Mnemonic
>Insert Quote
>You can also change the font at runtime using the SetFont() method. I have seen the trick with a >different fonts for aliens somewhere... I believe it was in Anachronox, or am I mistaken?

As always I am the fist one to know about things...

nevertheless...
You can use this different font thing to show emotions, I guess...
Like, bloody font when you're mad, frozen font when you're cold,
black font when you're evil, craaazy font when you're craxy et cetera et cetera ad infinitum.
(what does ad mean anyway? An ad, for a cool flashy product... And infinitum... like you're an infinite product from some flashy "cool" company making fake products called Windows xx that's crashing your computer every fifteen minutes. yeah, that have got to be it...