Adding text objects (button texts, popup texts, info texts) to menus (or scenes)

How I can add a text object to a menu for example for a text button? It would be nice to use the language editor modul to parametrize my menu scenes.... But I found no possibility to add a simple text with a specific font instead of (or in combination with) an object image....

I believe you are talking about layering over displayed texts on top of images in a specific position, yes? You could do that with narration texts, I believe. For some reason object texts do not seem to display on menu scenes.

The only alternative to use object texts, would be to create the menu scene as a regular scene.

However you could just create the texts as images & use an called by other action at the start to set all of their opacity values to 0 & then another called by other action which queries the current language to determine which images should have their opacity set to 100.

There are various ways you could go about this.

Thanks. But I mean static text objects, anytime visible if the object is visible.

For the feature it would be nice to have a new tab "Text" inside a scene object (like the Tab "Image" or "Animation"). So you could choose if you use this scene object:

- as a mouse area (object polygon)
- as an image (object image)
- as an animation (object animation)
- as a text object

So you could place any text things inside the scene on every position you want. The text object should hold a string for the text, a font, a x-y-position and an aligment option (left, center, right).

With this thing it is possible to build easy text buttons, popup texts for buttons or other scene decorations like some signs ("Restaurant") or others....

Ah ok I understand. It might have helped if you had created this thread in the improvements & conception section. Why I typed up some work-around methods.

Nobody wished this function yet?

I would build my menus and all buttons with text objects. So I would need no images with texts like "Start game" or "Exit to Desktop". I would create a text object with font 1 for an inactive button and a text object with a highlighted font 2 for an active button. This would be very easy to handle with different languages because alle strings in Visionaire are listed in the language editor...

If I have a simple main menu with 5 buttons, 2 states (normal & highlighted) and 3 different languages I have to handle 30 images for buttons! Additional I need tons of conditions to make the images dependent from the selected language!

With text objects I need only two different fonts. All texts are automatically dependent from the language. That would be so easy....

This is also one of the features I'd love to see in future updates of the Visionaire too. Ability to place text as part of the scenery as objects, for instance having a close up of a book with pages visible and have the Visionaire to handle the text part, easier to localize too

This could be the way to add static text objects to scene objects. In my photomontage I added a new tab "Texts" inside the scene object definition. In this way you can add more than one text objects to a scene object (for splittet texts, layered effects or something):

What about "Display object text" and "Hide object text"? I found this two action parts today. It seems I can use these two action parts to simulate language dependent text buttons. If I enter the button area then I could display the object text "Start game" (with a highlighted font) and if I leave the button area I could hide the object text (or the whole object) again. That's exactly what I need. But how I can change the font of an object text? What is the purpose of this two action parts normally?

They let you link a text to a scene object (has to be on a playable scene, menu will not work). The text will take on the properties of said linked object (is the object visible, active, inactive, opacity percentage etc).

Aside from that, the object text will remain on the scene while scene is shown indefinitely until the scene ends or you hide the object text by using the hide object text action part.

Technically you could do the same thing with narration text by adding it to a looping action block (jump to x action part) & setting the text as a background text. Actually narration text is more customizable because you can select which font to use unlike the object text which is defined in the game tab.

Hope this helps clear things up a little bit.

"Display object text" and "Hide object text" works with menu scene objects too! I have tested it. My dreams would come true if I could select the object text font for every object separately. Then it would be possible to build very nice language dependent text buttons with highlightning (and without special LUA things). Instead of the object image for the button text and the highlighted button text you could add object texts (with normal and highlighted fonts) to the scene objects at the beginning of the scene. That would be a very nice improvement. This would be downward compatible too. Then if no local object text font is selected, the standard object text font (GameObjectFont) could be used.