Game Development Community

Built-in text support - coming soon?

by baylor wetzel · in Torque Game Builder · 11/25/2006 (1:35 pm) · 2 replies

Many games show text in-game - damage, speech bubbles, that sort of thing. i've seen a lot of posts on the topic here and i know TGB doesn't support this, although there are ways to force it (mounted arrays of images, hacking the C++ code, etc.). One post mentioned something interesting - is GG considering adding this feature in the next release? If so, anyone have a ballpark estimate on when the next version is scheduled for?

As a note, the students i teach are not programmers and the time we give them to build games isn't a lot. So while i suspect the "edit the C++ and recompile TGB" approach works, it's probably not in the cards for our particular use. And since each of my students buys their own copy (as opposed to us distributing a CD), there's no way i'm going computer to computer to edit and recompile TGB for them. We have a hard enough time trying to explain the difference between local and global variables :)

-b

#1
11/26/2006 (9:56 am)
As you noted there is a resource that has a T2DTextObject---and yes, we agree, it was such a nice thing to have that we've cleaned it up, made it work much more tightly with the rest of TGB, and you'll be seeing it built in in a later release.

No ETA on it, but it's in the works!
#2
11/26/2006 (11:11 am)
There's also the GUI system, which is a perfectly reasonable way to add text to a game, and doesn't involve hacking C++. The drawback though is that basically you have to fix the resolution of your game to one specific resolution and not let the user change it or you wind up with some annoying problems to deal with. Specifically, GUIs are drawn according to the physical screen resolution, not the logical window size, so they don't automatically get scaled when you increase/decrease the resolution.

-JF