I thought i open this topic to discuss some ways and styles to handle the displayed character texts. Maybe you have further ideas we could add to this list and talk about ways on how to
achieve these.
1. Text above character
default in Visionaire Studio and needs no additional settings beside the font settings and applying that font to a character. The text gets displayed above the characters head and will stick to the edge of the screen or reposition itself automatically when the text would reach the border of the screen.
Often these texts have a max. line length, so that too long texts get automatically displayed in a multi-line string. Manual line breaks are also possible.
2. Text at fixed point on screen
the Character texts get displayed at a specific position (mostly at the bottom) of the screen and often can cover the whole screen width. Here especially longer texts per "display text action" can be displayed at once without overlaying a big area like in "method 1". Mostly only 1-3 lines are displayed at once.
This can also be combined with a dynamically background image behind the text to make it more readable.
The reposition of the text can be achieved via the setTextPosition Hook or via a "textStarted" EventHandler.
The dynamically resizing background for the text can be rendered via the lua draw function "drawSpriteWithNineRect".
An additional feature which can be used here a extra face art graphics like in visual novels or
topdown jRPG styled games (face sets)
3. Speechbubbles
the character texts get displayed like the normal character text, but will have a dynamically resizing speechbubble / textbox graphic behind the text. This would make sense, when the character texts need to "pop out" a bit more. The difficult thing here is that the speechbubble graphic gets rendered above the normal displayed text. So you need to render a new text above the speechbubble via lua, too. Because the text is also displayed via a lua draw function ( graphics.drawFont(...) ), you can mix in additional information like the character name in different color, etc. The possibities which are doable with speechbubbles could also be used in the "method 2", mentioned here.
4. No text at all
for games where the language and texts are not or rarely used at all, you can display texts, thoughts, etc over images/sprites which get rendered either in combination of a speechbubble or loosely floating over a characters head or different positions on screen.
For this you can come up with lua based cataloges/tables of different sprites to get rendered or just use a custom font where each different Letter is a specific symbol/image.
5. ... more ideas?
kind regards
Sebastian
Thread Captain
Forum Fan