Typewriter Effect Text

Juggalo_Jesus

Has anyone figured out or does anyone know how to create/ do a typewriter effect on text being displayed?

pianofire

@Juggalo_Jesus Do you mean like a typewriter font?

Juggalo_Jesus

@pianofire no, like an animated effect displaying it letter by letter instead of just printing the entire line out all at once. You see this effect used in a lot of games and I am using the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to show you what I mean.

pianofire

@Juggalo_Jesus OK understood. There is nothing built-in but it shouldn't be too hard to write a function to do this.

Juggalo_Jesus

@pianofire I am going to try my hand at it soon I was just wondering if anyone had figured it out before I spend my time on trying to figure it out.

pobtastic

It's really just a case of setting a "cached" variable and ticking it upwards every x frame. I've not done this specifically but I guess it's similar enough to other things I've written. Something like;

frame_count = 0
string = "Really looking forward to playing Steve's Missile Command game"
tick = 0

loop
  clear()
  printat(0, 0, string[:tick])
  if frame_count % 20 == 0 then
    // Or however you want to do it?
    // This would (hopefully) just cycle it round to zero again
    // but you'd obviously continue on rather than pause here.
    tick = (tick + 1) % len(str)
  endif
  update()
  frame_count += 1
repeat

Obviously that's completely untested!

lawyerlounge

what is the colon before "tick" for?

printAt(0, 0, string[:tick])

Also, what and how is % used?

Thankyou!

pobtastic

Okay, I just tested it and meh ~ use this instead;

frame_count = 0
string = "Really looking forward to playing Steve's Missile Command game"
tick = 0
proceed = false

while !proceed loop
  clear()
  printat(0, 0, string[:tick])
  if frame_count % 20 == 0 then
    tick += 1
    if tick == len(string) then
      proceed = true
    endif
  endif
  update()
  frame_count += 1
repeat

It was close enough :)

edit: See https://fuzearena.com/forum/topic/70/hints-and-tips/9

pianofire

@lawyerlounge Have a look at this post to see how you can slice up strings using : https://fuzearena.com/forum/topic/70/hints-and-tips/9

% is the modulus operator which basically returns the remainder when you divide by the number see https://fuzearena.com/help/view/modulus

pobtastic

Oop! Thanks, I missed the question about the %! The good thing about doing it by frame skipping, is that you can then also add controls in there too, and just or a button press which would speed up the "typing".

lawyerlounge

Ok neat I think I understand now. The modulo operation is used to only run this loop when frame_count is a number divisible by 20 with no remainder. so it will print a new letter every 20 frames? so you could even have a button press to have frame_count += 10 to speed up the text.

Also when you have
Loop
clear()
update()
repeat
how many times does that run per second, is it 60fps?

Juggalo_Jesus

@pobtastic Thank you for this!

Martin

The above (% on the number of frames) is how I've always done this kind of thing, but I think this might be the first instance where I might be tempted to try and use a timer instead?

Martin

How about this?

string message = "Really looking forward to playing Steve's Missile Command game"
tick = 0
speed = 0.25

// Call function 'doTick' every 'speed' seconds, indefinitely
tickTimer = setTimer(speed, -1, doTick())

loop
    clear()
    printat(0, 0, message[:tick])
    update()
repeat

function doTick()
    tick += 1
    if (tick >= len(message)) then tick = 0 endif
return void

Nearly always lots of ways to approach the same thing. Usually all just as valid.

SteveZX81

Thanks for that, I just ..borrowed it..