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Other ▼.is software designed to make developing games easy and fun. It features a unique 'Drag-and-Drop' system which allows non-programmers to make simple games. You'd need to elaborate about that.The way I see it, a character 'simply' has a list of strings to show depending of associated conditions. In, the guy develops a system equivalent to rpg maker switches that could be very useful in this matter. Each ini 'block' would feed the database: what character says this line, what's the text, what's the condition ('switch' name+value) to have it shown, should it change some switch's value and/or trigger a request for the player input.Once the database is filled, no need to nested if or anything: just determine what's the current most prioritized condition for the current character and show the associated text.Not simple to feed (just a bunch of lines with added parameters), but certainly feasible without any 'nested if statement nightmare' ^^.
Drawtext ( x, y, 'HelloWorld' );drawtext(x, y, 'HelloWorld');Would draw to the screen exactly the same as “Hello#World”. Escape charactersIf you’re familiar with strings in programming languages, you know that it gets tricky when using certain characters that are reserved for program syntax or markup. Most languages allow you to “escape” the markup syntax so that you can still use characters normally reserved for markup purposes as literal characters in a string.
GML is no exception. #What if you want to use a # in a string, and you don’t want it to signify a new line? Use the “#” escape character.The string 'We're #1!' Would be drawn like so:We’re #1! QuotesA matched pair of quotes, single or double, can be used in GML to begin and end a string. If you want quotes to appear as text within a string, you can use the other type of quote to encapsulate them, like so. Mystring = 'This is a single-quoted string.'
;mystring = 'This is a double-quoted string.' ;mystring = 'This is 'an example' of a string including double quotes-as-text.' ;mystring = 'This is 'an example' of a string including single quotes-as-text.' ;mystring = 'This is a single-quoted string.'
;mystring = 'This is a double-quoted string.' ;mystring = 'This is 'an example' of a string including double quotes-as-text.' ;mystring = 'This is 'an example' of a string including single quotes-as-text.' ;It gets tricky when you need to have BOTH types of quotes in the same sentence.
Mystring = 'Bob said ' We shouldn' + ' + 't.' + '; // Bob said 'We shouldn't.' Mystring = 'Bob said ' We shouldn' + ' + 't.' + '; // Bob said 'We shouldn't.'
It looks like a mess, but you just have to do a lot of concatenation and quote your quotes with the other type of quote marks. String concatenationAs with many languages, you can combine two strings together by adding them with the + operator. With number values + adds them; with strings, + concatenates the two strings together, creating a longer string made of the first one and second one stitched together. You can do this with literal string values, or with variables containing strings. Health = 100;drawstring ( x, y, 'Player1 Health: ' + string ( health ) );health = 100;drawstring(x, y, 'Player1 Health: ' + string(health)); GML String functionsWe’ve already introduced a few of the more commonly useful ones, but there are many other useful. I’m not going to go into each one in depth, but review the official documentation and keep in mind that they’re out there, and can be useful.One important thing to be aware of with GML strings is that, unlike most other languages, GML strings are 1-indexed, not 0-indexed.
This means that when counting the characters that make up the string, the first character is character 1, not character 0. GML text drawing functionsMostly I have used drawtext and drawtextext, but it’s good to know that there are a few more variations on these basic text drawing functions. drawtext. drawtextcolor. drawtextext. drawtextextcolor.
drawtextexttransformed. drawtextexttransformedcolor. drawtexttransformed.
drawtexttransformedcolorIt might seem like a lot to keep track of, but it’s pretty easy if you remember the following:drawtext: basic draw text function.ext: allows you control over the line spacing and width of the draw area. This means you don’t have to manually handle line breaks by inserting # or return characters in your text.transformed: allows you to scale and rotate the drawn text.color: allows you to set a color gradient and alpha to the text.Again, text is always drawn using the current global drawing color, alpha, halign and valign properties. It’s best to set these before drawing to ensure that they are the expected values, using drawsetcolor, drawsetalpha, drawsethalign, and drawsetvalign functions. Keep code clean by storing strings in variablesThis is perhaps obvious, but it’s often useful to store a string value in a variable, to keep your code neater and easier to read. Drawstring ( x, y, 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.##Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.##But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' );drawstring(x, y, 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.##Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.##But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.'
);— is a lot harder to read than. Drawstring ( x, y, gettysburgaddress );drawstring(x, y, gettysburgaddress);— and moreover, all that text gets in the way of comprehension of what your code is doing.
So use variables to store strings, and keep your code looking clean. DrawtextextWhile we’re dealing with a very long string, it’s a good opportunity to talk about a function that makes drawing them much easier.You could manually set line breaks in a long string by sprinkling #’s every N characters or so, but that is laborious and inflexible. It’s better to use the drawtextext function, which allows you to specify a width for the line, and (optionally) also how many pixels should separate lines.
Drawtextext ( x, y, string, verticalseparation, width );drawtextext(x, y, string, verticalseparation, width);When drawn, the line will automatically break when it reaches the width provided to the function. FormattingGameMaker is rather limited in its typographical capability when drawing text to the screen.
GameMaker Font resources, unlike an installed font on the system, are a specific size and style only. There’s no bold or italic or other style options available that you can use to modify the font resource. If you want bold or italic, you have to create a new font resource, and use drawsetfont(font) to that resource in order to use it.This means that if you want to use bold text in a sentence, you need to create a second font resource for the bold font, draw your normal text, then switch fonts to the bold font, and draw the bold text, somehow positioning the two different drawings so that they look like they’re a single block of text. You have to leave a hole in your normal text where the bold word will appear.
This is not easy, nor is it generally recommended. If you really want it, and are masochistic enough to put yourself through the trial and error to do it, go ahead. But before too long you’ll probably realize that it’s not worth the effort.See this script which allows you to draw rich text format, originally written by Miah84 and improved by me. Special Effects Scrolling textScrolling text is extremely easy to do. The drawtext function must be called by some object, and includes arguments for the x and y where the text will be drawn.
Game Maker Studio 2 Text Input
Simply change the x and y over time, add you have moving text. The easiest thing to do is to set the instance that is drawing the text in motion. Typewriter textAnother easy to implement technique is “typewriter text” — that is, displaying a string one character at a time as though it were being typed out.First, let’s take a string stored in a variable, mystring.stringlength(mystring) will give you the length of mystring.drawtext(x, y, mystring) would draw the entire string at once. But we want to draw it one letter at a time.The GML function stringcopy(string, index, length) comes in handy here. We can use this instead of string in our drawtext function.