Wiki: game_text (Half-Life)

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Point Entity

This entity is used to display messages on-screen. It is used instead of env_message because it doesn't need to a file full of message strings to be distributed with the map.

Attributes

Name (targetname) - Property used to identify entities.
Target (target) - When an entity is activated, it triggers the entity with the name specified by Target.
Master (master) - The name of a multisource (or game_team_master) entity. A master must usually be active in order for the entity to work. Thus they act almost like an on/off switch, in their simplest form, and like an AND gate in the case of the multisource.
Message Text (message) - The text to be displayed.
X (0 - 1.0 = left to right, -1 = center) (x) - X position of text (across screen).
Y (0 - 1.0 = top to bottom, -1 = center) (y) - Y position of text (up/down screen).
Text Effect (effect) - Effect to apply to the text (0 = Fade In/Out, 1 = Credits, 2 = Scan Out).
Color1 (color) - The main colour.
Color2 (color2) - The highlight colour.
Fade in Time (or character scan time) (fadein) - Time taken to fade in each character.
Fade Out Time (fadeout) - Time taken to fade out message.
Hold Time (holdtime) - Length of time to hold message on screen after fading in.
Scan time (scan effect only) (fxtime) - The amount of time the highlight lags behind the leading edge of the text.
Text Channel (channel) - Any of four channels can be used by this entity. If while one channel is being used another entity on the same channel is triggered, the old text will be cleared from the screen.

Flags

All Players (1) - Show the text to all players. If not set, only the player who activated the game_text will see the message.

Inputs

Outputs

Notes

You are limited to a maximum message length of 127 characters. Exceeding this can crash HL.

*
Line breaks can be added with by inserting a \n after each sentence where you want a new line. e.g. Game Over \n Thanks for playing!
would yield:
Game Over
Thanks for playing!
*
X, y, effect, color, color2, fadein, fadeout and fxtime are the same as those found in titles.txt.
*
The easiest way to get a text-based message at the start of your level, like the Black Mesa one from HL, is to add a trigger_auto to the level and set it's target to the name of your game_text. You might have to add a delay to the trigger, depending on wether you fade the screen in or not, but either way when the game starts your text will be displayed.
*
For some reason, Valve saw fit to remove this entity from Team Fortress Classic.

jamie

Commented 2 years ago2022-04-19 00:48:19 UTC Comment #104339

For some weird reason if you put an gramatical-stressed word (exámple) the game will crash.

jamie

Commented 2 years ago2022-06-01 00:43:04 UTC Comment #104487

The only way to add thís kind of words is using env_message

kimilil

Commented 8 months ago2024-02-23 10:56:45 UTC Comment #106006

There should be more information about character sets: what the game supports, how to get the best results on displaying most languages in whatever charset env is necessary (like VNs requiring shift-jis system charset).

Decided to test for myself.

Vanilla Half-Life's text engine seem to be broken for anything that's not ASCII. It consumes single-byte character sets (presumably ANSI/Windows-1252/system locale) but the text rendering is consuming UTF-8. This results in the broken text consistent with the table in this page: https://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html

Haven't looked at the other SDKs or engines (candidates include Updated/Unified/Featureful/Xash-fwgs/Pathos) on how they handle text. Hopefully better than the unrecoverable mess vanilla is in right now.

ALSO, JACK will purposefully mangle non-ASCII texts. You'd need to edit the .map directly and feed it to the compilers yourself.

2024-06-29
apparently HLCSG also needs -notextconvert argument. sauce: singularmurderer

DaSalba

Commented 6 days ago2024-10-29 22:53:13 UTC Comment #106475

The target attribute does not work. This entity can't trigger anything else.

game_text (Half-Life) Last edited 15 years ago2009-02-26 13:08:43 UTC