Making a message come up?... Created 20 years ago2003-12-24 13:04:30 UTC by Dark Phoenix

Im making a map for a single player level of the mod Action HL.
What im trying to do is make it so that when my player clicks on something, like for example a piece of paper on a desk or something, i can get a text message up saying what it says.
What would be even better would be to have a picture come up which looks like the piece of paper and have the writing on that.
So is there a way i can click on something and make a picture come up either for a time space of until they click off it?

Thanks
Merry Christmas

I dont know how to make a picture come up, maybe a sprite
but i do know how to make text come up! Put game_message entity, anywhere u like, not make the pice of paper a button or trigger or what ever you want! Give the game_text a name and make the trigger or button hav the game_text's name as the target!!! game_texts r easy to make as well,just select the color. position on the screen and te effect and the text!!! Simple! There is a harder, more flexible way, but i wont go into that now! Hope that helped

oh, typo, i said game_message, sorry, its game_text!

I had a go at that and i couldnt get it to work, but im sure i was doing something wrong.
Anyway, ive found something else, although i havent actually tried it yet.
Im writing my messages in the title.txt file, and then hopefully i'll be able to do it from there.

env_message uses titles.txt,

you can edit the appearence, (scan effects etc) in the txt file

yes but that only allows for smothing like 40 characters/ letters, and will crash the game if any more! trust me i used it as part of trial and error for my letters aswell Dark Pheonix and its not easy a string of triggers..etc crash the game after the 3rd trigg and the 4th never works

but i will be adding a tutorial on it at the end of the week (hopefully),
look at this space!

Also Dark Pheonix guess you been playing the you know what mod , ahemm H.O.E

the picture thing requires coding. it was used in poke646's "note engine". i think a cheap way would b 2 make the paper with the writing where the player cant get 2 and have a camera look at it as if u were readin it.

that would be very wierd in game though ministeve!

for a realistic sized piece of paper in the game could only fit somthing a few words at most nothing more! other wise you wouldn't be able to read it,

now if it had a lot of stuff on it then you would be looking at a mountain of papers all over the place!

wat i mean is make a room where the player cant get 2. make a big bit of paper with writing on it. wen the ingame paper is approached, a camera looks at the big peice with the writing. like so.
___
|| ||
||bp||
||__|| _t Y y=you t=table, with paper on it bp=big
|___r| _|_|________ paper which has the writing r=room that the player cannot get to.

when "y" stands next 2 "t", the cam is triggered and u c "bp" hidden inside "r". get me?

Yeah, that is what I would have suggested, It is also a way to present a picture. Freeze the player and trigger a camera somewhere else looking at what you want the player to see.

maby you coul use voice mesages also very handy

I edited the titles.txt and it works really nicely i think. It looked really good the way it individually faded in each letter. I slowed it down to make it look as if the player was reading it in his head. I really like it.

I managed to fit in all of this:

Diary Extract:

Day 26:
Its been 26 days since the
'accident' that threw this
town into total chaos.
The man I carried up here
from the wreckage of his
car is still unconsious.
If I dont leave soon to
get him medicine he wont
make it.
I hope this nightmare will
of ended by the time he
wakes up.

Day 27:
I hear them moving and
screaming during the night.
I pray they dont find us.
I must leave him now.
I put my knife in his
pocket, if he needs to
defend himself.
I hope this bunker will
protect him...

Sounds kinda gay i know. but that almost filled the whole centre of the screen. It was a perfect size. There was no problems.

What i did to trigger it was i put the book in the middle of a dark corridor with a flickering light directly above it to draw attention to it, and i made the book a button which triggers the env_message and it reads out the diary extract. So if you want to read books you have to press 'use'. I thought it worked quite nicely.

Also, Loque whats H.O.E?

Happy Christmas everyone

Heart of evil, Dark Pheonix

also i too have done a tutorial on this message thing and will upload it sometime today.

Oh, Heart of Evil.

Is that the SP mod set in Vietnam with zombies and stuff?

I think ive had a look at it before and i looked at the screenshots and thought it looked pretty tacky. I havent actually played it. Maybe i should download it and see what its like. But i havent got my ideas from that, if thats what your thinking. I just love things like resident evil and silent hill. I know theres a resident evil mod coming out but ive been following that ever since it was announced and i thinks its been about 2 years now. I got bored. Also they kept changing the models and their skins, and they actually got worse! Maybe they kept getting new modelers or something but it just started to look crap, but the maps looked quite good.

yes i sent my tutorial to andy, hopefully it will work!
HOE is annoying but not that tacky, 8 and 9 out of 10 world wide

Right, in summary....

To get a message no longer than 127 characters use a game_text.
To get a really good looking message, with pictures use a camera.
If you want to get a scrolling message of more than 127 characters use a trigger_relay between game texts, or
If you want it to be the same as a Chapter Title style, then use an env_message and alter the titles.txt.
Don't forget that the titles.txt will have to be part of your distribution files.

I hope you didn't alter the Half-Life titles.txt..... Or if you did, you backed it up first.

Loque's tutorial will be out in the New Year, just some fine tuning to be done.

[quote]Loque's tutorial will be out in the New Year, just some fine tuning to be done.[/qoute]

oops wrong button , i'll look at the fine tune link soon then

Oh yeah,
POKE 646 had the advantage of totally reworked titles.txt and strings list, actually I think there wasn't a shred of the original HL in any of the stuff they did.

And the New Year means just that. Sometime Next Year

i figured that out, i guess i'am gonna have to re-write it a fourth time with the new stuff on game text you sent me?,, and shame on you didn't i tell you that rendering should be done on the buttons Andy!, heheheheehe i still included it in the written tutorial in an bracket underneath the 2nd step!

before i re-write it yet again!, Andy have you remembered anything else?

Hmm, I remember a "No tutorials till ne thext year"

Did you include a part on Chapter Title Messages?

well sort of, instead imade like an background thing who you wher you live and your reason for being in the tutorial, all you would need to do would just change the code for the first message to come up and you could use that space for a title!/chapter name, Also Kol i'am going to have to re-write it again cos Andy sent me some stuff that he forgot about which prolly means that the written tut will now be well over 9 pages long!, currently its 8. i mailed him what i had done so far to see if one part of the written tut is how he wanted it.

I'll keep you posted.

beside i wont be spending nearly 15 straight hours re-working the mod now i'am going to wait for Andy's reply via email to see if i hadn't already included what he just asked me to do.

Looking at it now, and yes Kol, I am doing a little thing on Chapter titles (Edit: Andy)

8 pages! OMG!
No one is going to read it...
its not worth it...
What do you have in that thing anyway..

Well i need to show you code examples or you wont know what i mean in the tut will you?, i'd say that the written tut without the codes is about 3 or 4 pages. perhaps that could be an option with or with out codes, just like with or without pictures.