#78120 - dashperiod - Wed Apr 05, 2006 7:12 am
Very n00b question. But since dialogue boxes are such an important part of any RPG game, I wanted to make sure I implement it well.
So I was thinking of implementing it in the following way: draw a slightly transparent rectangle using tiles and then draw text within the area of that rectangle. Ideally I'd like to use some pretty gfx tiles to make the rectangle something more bearable than the blue screen of death.
FIRST: feel free to offer better ways of implementing this! I feel like there probably is a better way.
SECOND: if this is a good approach, any advice on how to draw the rectangle & text would be greatly appreciated.
#78130 - Dan2552 - Wed Apr 05, 2006 9:47 am
my method would've been making a sprite (the box) appear and drawing text over that, but your method seems more efficient.
I'm also a noob so I cant really help with scripting it, but I'll be very interested in the answer.
#78158 - gauauu - Wed Apr 05, 2006 3:49 pm
Depends on how complicated you want to get with your text system, but I've been using 2 backgrounds...one to draw the frame (pretty frame with tiles, then some pure black tiles to make the background), then writing over it with another background using a tiled font.
#78170 - dashperiod - Wed Apr 05, 2006 7:10 pm
Simple is good for now. The way you did it, gauauu, sounds like what i was thinking of doing. I'm still pretty new to GBA developing - do you think you could give me a little breakdown on how you implemented your's? Thanks a bunch!
#78176 - thegamefreak0134 - Wed Apr 05, 2006 7:51 pm
TONC has a couple of pretty good tutorials on a text system. He even goes through different ways of doing things, like using tilesets or sprites.
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#78194 - dashperiod - Wed Apr 05, 2006 9:59 pm
oh thanks! i've looked on that site a bunch...i don't know how i managed to miss that
#78227 - gauauu - Thu Apr 06, 2006 2:24 am
Ha..I had missed it also until now..maybe it's fairly new...
Anyway, it looks like it covers everything you need.
#78272 - dashperiod - Thu Apr 06, 2006 10:32 am
i took a look at TONC, and i DEFINITELY am going to use his method (or a variation) in the future. however right now i've got a deadline to hit for my class (this is for a project that doubles as personal endeavor and course-project).
can anyone suggest a good and simple way of implementing a text system? i am using VHAM and the HAMlib, so any suggestions including func's from that library are helpful.
i looked through it's built-in text functions but they're not so great and pretty limited with control.
(basically i'm hacking together a playable demo for class, and then i'm going to go back and unhackify the code to be...actually efficient)
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#78357 - Natso - Fri Apr 07, 2006 12:34 am
I made a program in delphi to convert ASCII strings to my font design for the gba, with all my character tiles being 8x8. By using a simple array(the first character always containing the length of the string) I wrote a small function that takes the array's first character, and loops through the remainder of the string, writing the tile numbers to the correct tile spots on the screen. It's really quite easy...
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#78361 - sgeos - Fri Apr 07, 2006 1:34 am
I'd do the following:
BG0: text
BG1: bg effect (rain, etc)
BG2: bg overlay (appears above the character)
BG3: bg underlay (appears under the character)
If you want a "far" background, set BG1
to display under BG3.
As far as the text goes, you can opt for all bg tiles,
or use bg tiles for the border and sprites for text.
Depending on your game, you could use alpha
blending/fading to creat your dialogue box and
display text using sprites.
-Brendan
#78364 - sajiimori - Fri Apr 07, 2006 2:11 am
Final Fantasy 6 swapped out BGs during HBlank so it could have all 4 BGs available for normal gameplay.
#78441 - sgeos - Fri Apr 07, 2006 10:20 am
Clearly you can make your dialouge implementation as fancy as you want. =) If you need all your BGs for normal gameplay, then do what you need to do. I suggest that you first figure out want you need be able to do. Then strive for simplicity.
-Brendan