Game Development Community

In Game Text

by Alex Pennington · in Technical Issues · 01/06/2008 (12:05 pm) · 2 replies

Ok my question here is about the mystic topic of in game text. I've seen links on this website and others about classes in TorqueScript that allow in game text, then there's that YakBack thing. In game text is pretty standard nowadays and I would consider it essential to game development, my question is, isn't there any easy way to splat some text out there? Like some kind of cout>> or print statement for GUI, where you define a box and then output text to it? I would imagine internally it would be just rendering the 2d font as pixels and outputting that, which is what your OS is doing essentially too. I assume that by the amount of classes and plugins available for Torque that this isn't just as easy as defining a box and outputting text. So how do they implement this internally?, do they throw out a billboard 3d and output a font class with alpha on a surface and dynamically create a UV map on the billboard 3d or do they hack the pixels over the screen? I apologize if I sound a little n00bish, I haven't dont a whole lot with game development yet, I know alot of the theory, just haven't tried it yet ^_^.

Thanks for your help everyone,
--Alex
Alex Pennington's profile picture
Alex Pennington

About the author

Recent Threads

  • 2d In Torque Game Engine
    • NextNext Thread
    PrevPrevious Thread
    More from Technical Issues


    Torque Owner Nikos Beck
    #1
    01/06/2008 (2:39 pm)
    I'm surprised no one has responded. There is a T2DTextObject in TGB that works similar to what you want. You can also write to GUIs. Many have implemented their own text using sprites. I use the sprite method because I can customize the font and it's marginally slower than the in-engine text objects.

    Alex Pennington
    #2
    01/08/2008 (8:16 am)
    Thanks for the help first of all. So the T2DTextObject would be what lets you have things like a box that displays rolling text, like chat box in MMORPG's, right? Then if I wanted something like computer monitor with a blinking message or something I would use the sprite method? I have one other question for you, about the sprite method. Would that involve source code modding in C++ like the tic-tac-toe MOD: http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5129?

    Thanks in advance for the help,
    --Alex