velocirection
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Text box + choice box tech
🕑 Added 2020-10-28 03:52:11 +0000 UTCSo I have been chipping away at the basics. I have created two of the very important things in an rpg- text boxes and choice boxes.
The text boxes are going to be used for displayed text that is grabbed from dialogue tree text files. The choice boxes are more important however- these can be extended to be inventory windows, equipment menus etc... without much work. The basic idea behind a choice is "is it selected?" and if it is "is the confirm button pressed?" and if it is, do the thing that that choice is supposed to do by communicating this with the object it's assigned to (likely a singleton event controller)
Choice boxes can hypothetically hold unlimited amounts of choices- though, I don't see having more than maybe a handful at a time in the game, besides for menus where each choice text would be an item or equipment thing.
The choice boxes for dialogue are dynamic in that the text is formatted according to the longest row of choices where all shorter rows are centered in the box. The choice box size is also calculated based on the columns (max of 3 but could be more) and the number of rows.
Text boxes are also ripe with features:
1. Lines are prewrapped before being drawn as each line the box is an array of text that's grabbed from a larger string.
2. Support for "|" as a delay character. There is matching delay array that holds how long each character pauses before being drawn (this is also a string but of numbers and the numbers are cast as integers char by char to get the delay amount)
3. Pressing confirm makes the whole line appear. Pressing again advances the text. (pressing confirm after the whole line is drawn simply advances text)
4. Can be any size:
I usually use the opening first few sentences of the late, great Harlan Ellison's I have no mouth and I must scream as test text ^^; so I did not write that!
Finally, the above is a demonstration of the dialogue tree editor I have made. Though I plan on doing a more fun demonstration later where I have my butt on cam and write a test smutty dialogue tree :3
That's pretty much it for now. I do apologize for not having anything really interesting but I do think this will turn into something special and maybe something that people will be interested in ^^;
Finally though, I drew a concept of a refined pig main character and cherub guardian angel:
-Velocirection, chief sexy officer of Pizzass Games.
