Taking Suggestions for Bitmapped Font object

All right figured out a bit more. I think importing 1 single file would be the best way to go. That way you can crop the frames in Constructs editor, or leave them for a bounding box.

This one is 50 x 75 btw

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/666516/chrometexr.png

One annoying thing with this automation process is you cant add a dropshadow. Im wondering if the dropshadow object will work with different frames.

oops

I only suggest vectical scrolling if that's not already done/planned.

thank you for the suggestion, and yes that one is planned

All right figured out a bit more. I think importing 1 single file would be the best way to go. That way you can crop the frames in Constructs editor, or leave them for a bounding box

oops

thanks again newt

I think when the plugin is up and working I'm going to make an exe font cutterupper tool, if canvas and image manipulator are up and running well in the latest version

it's a little bit of a pain to cut up tiles if they aren't evenly spaced, or if they are in vertical order instead of horizontal, whether you're using construct or photoshop or whatever. I don't know of anything that really makes it not a pain

Hi again, thanks for listening to my suggestions :3

What I meant by an EOF character is basically inside a text file a way to signify "this is the end of a single block of text". For example, in an RPG when you do have control characters to prompt for the next string in a block, the "EOF" control character signifies not only another prompt, but that the string has terminated and the text window can be closed. You would want it to be separate from a prompt control character because it could be used to tokenize strings into blocks of text when parsing it in. That way, each block of text can be iterated through in a manner that doesn't require every string to be in a "flat space" in the file. Let me try a visual example.

What the heck are you doing?

Get out of here!

I said, get lost.

Now in our text file with "EOF" control characters, those characters would be used to separate block1 from block2 without having to have a flat space of 3 strings, and would be easier to parse and read/write inside a text editor. It doesn't have to be in some weird INI style format, it could be as simple as an escape code (like "\n" for newline could be analogous to "\p" to pause for input, and "\b" to indicate the end of a block of text), or more symbolic like a pipe ("|"). These are just some ideas I'm tossing out there to make formatting the string for various applications and purposes easier.

Also, if you think importing straight from a plaintext file is too easy for spoilers, you could give people a generic rot-13 string manipulation function or something like that which could be used before passing that onto the object

(A pleasant side-effect of this would be that we could also send unencrypted strings through rot13() from within construct and export our text the same way using a standard text object)

nice work lucid, this is looking good

turns out word wrap is the hardest thing ever thought of

anywho, sorry no beta yet

but we're getting close

there's a slight issue with vertical alignment on wrapped text to get worked out

and then it should be downhill(in the good way) from there

here's what's working though:

<img src="http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20Folder/CustomKeys/New%20folder/Runtime/Capture6.PNG">

left right center, top bottom center alignment

word wrap

horizontal and vertical scrolling

and wraparound scrolling

also get phrase height

and get phrase width

set spacing per character, and for all characters

and though the actions aren't there, setting individual character widths and heights as well

don't worry, we're getting there

appreciate your word processor developers

holy crap

word wrap was the bane of my existence for a day and half

especially for centered and right aligned text

but I conquered it and it has been vanquished

I'm getting excited already

HURRY UP xD

~Sol

Um hwres the spell check?

ok, so my heart wrenching guilt in the wake of not providing the promised beta on time and my desolate loneliness here in awesomeworld leads me to provide this radical demo for you fine folks:

click here to try it!

the box the text is in is resizable and movable

aside from the obvious features being displayed, you're also looking at Attach To Object, which is automatically positioning and sizing the textbox to the box object

there is a feature to limit displayed text to the inside of the box only, which is not enabled in this demo,

play with it, have fun!

don't try to resize the window to backwards, it will crash the exe

<img src="http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20Folder/CustomKeys/New%20folder/Runtime/screenshot.PNG">

extra info:

also, although the editbox doesn't show it, there is a newline which is why the text wraps as it does. the text is actually: this is it folks. what do you think so far?

[/code:2rn78ija]

not

this is it folks.what do you think so far?[/code:2rn78ija]
I wanted to show word wrap working with newline as well

you'll notice word wrap on horizontally centered text can be a little hokey at smaller distances
which will also mess with the vertical alignment in those same instances
and somehow I messed up right aligned text at the last minute (bad enough it's not in this exe)

I think left aligned text is working perfectly for all vertical alignments and all widths of wrapping
[/h2]

Oh sweet

I'll give it a test here in a few mins... just have to finish eating first

~Sol

This is awesome work so far . Very nice job.

I can't figure out what the newline character is, though. It looks like two pipes in the edit box to me, but when I type two pipes nothing happens.

This is awesome work so far . Very nice job.

I can't figure out what the newline character is, though. It looks like two pipes in the edit box to me, but when I type two pipes nothing happens.

thanks

I can't figure out the newline character either

in construct it's just "newline" (without the quotes)

I'm not sure about the editbox object though

when the rest of the plugin is totally working

I'm going to add editbox functionality anyway, so you can let people type in their names for games and such, without having an invisible edit box

also, so you can limit it to a certain number of characters, and such

also, for those of you just joining us:

click here to try it so far!

YOU THA MAN!!!

about unicode typing: my keyboard just has them keys O_O

however, a catch: I'm not sure if the construct-provided text-field reads unicode or it uses latin-1.

Any text file with characters outside ASCII can be turned into unicode with notepad. Just Save As... Unicode (little endian) or Unicode Big Endian.

Don't mess with UTF-8, it's difficult and has variable character width. It's mainly used for compatibility with legacy ASCII libraries or to reduce memory footprint. It's good for storage but bad for runtime.

Edit: action to override spacing with kerning is fine I guess... one could always loop and load offsets from a file manually.

Is there a baseline?

latin-1 is a macintosh based encoding, construct probably uses UTF-8 if it supports unicode

I suggested UTF8 for the specific purpose that ASCII is by far the most commonly used encoding or character set being used for text blitting purposes, and therefore it would defeat the purpose of a text blitter to force double-byte unicode. UTF-8 solves this by being backwards compatible with ASCII.

It shouldn't be that much harder to implement UTF-8 than it would be to implement UTF-16. A few bits in each byte of UTF-8 are reserved for character control which would allow you to properly map them to an extended graphical glyph set should you choose, which is what we'd want for input that would require (for example) displaying Japanese or another language with a non-roman character set. See here for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description

thanks for all the support guys

beta tonight come hell or high water

It'll be a new thread, cuz I'm sure plenty of people stopped checking up here

Finally lucid!