Breaking lines in strings at the appropriate spots

[baconhawka7x]

I think I posted something similar to this a while ago.

I am making a "speech bubble" system in my game Heroic, that allows all of the npc's to have assigned dialogs that they say.

When you walk up and talk to them by pushing some button, a little rectangular speech window pops up by there face and text is displayed, (This text is there dialog).

So, let's say I have something like this:

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-- Let's say I have a table for each npc's data..
npc_data = {}
npc_data[1] = {name = "Bob", Image = "image/directory/here", dialog = "Hello there, I am Bob!"}

I want to make it, so that if the dialog text is wider than the dialog bubble, that the line breaks. I have been looking at lua's string functionality, and found the syntax for breaking a line: /n. Which is probably something everyone knows, but I kind of skipped learning about strings in lua when I was first starting (It's Probably the reason I am having this problem!)

So It is possible to do something like this,

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dialog = "Hello there, /n I am bob"

But I was wondering if there was a way to automate it? Just so that the game can break the lines for me.


I'd Appreciate any and all help, thanks!:D

[slime]

I want to make it, so that if the dialog text is wider than the dialog bubble, that the line breaks. I have been looking at lua's string functionality, and found the syntax for breaking a line: /n.

love.graphics.printf will do word-wrapping for you. Also, newlines in strings are \n, not /n.

[baconhawka7x]

Ah, thank you, also wondering, is there a way to get the total number of lines in a string? I'm planning on making multiple "paged" dialogs if the text is taller than the rectangle. For example, you can push next to see the rest of the dialog.

[slime]

If you want to get the number of newlines ('\n' characters) in a string, you can do something like: local _, count = str:gsub("\n", "\n").
If you want to get how many lines love.graphics.printf will wrap the text to, you can use [wiki]Font:getWrap[/wiki].

[baconhawka7x]

I still need just a bit more guidance.



I can figure out how to make a system of pages myself, But what I'm really struggling with is how to select, and move the last few runoff lines.

How would I do that?

[Robin]

You can use love.graphics.setScissor with the coordinates of the box before drawing the text, and after drawing the text, call the same function again without arguments.