Question: Changing textboxes (graphic novel style)

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HypnoKitten
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Question: Changing textboxes (graphic novel style)

#1 Post by HypnoKitten »

Hi everyone, fairly new to RenPy here so I apologize if this has been asked - went through the full tutorials, read through
viewtopic.php?f=51&t=9812
viewtopic.php?f=51&t=46229
viewtopic.php?f=51&t=9233
and tried to search for this here and on Google, not quite having luck - but I think this is possible?

Image
Image

So when thinking through how I'd like my first game to look I started thinking about narration, dialog.. and this kept flashing in my mind - pulling from classic comic / graphic novel styling over the images. (Ties into the art style I'm going for).

The links above talk about changing a textbox but by going into the window styling it seems like it would be a one-time change that affects everything (so can't have one look for one character, another for another character, and certainly couldn't re-position them after start?)

The tutorial talks about how to use Frames / Borders to stretch / position Displayables, so that seems like one way to go, but I didn't see anywhere about how I might put a Character into there (and the relevant styling). There are Text Displayable but seems like they'd miss most of the powers of Character styling, not seeing how to attach them to the stretching Frame / Border, and not seeing any way to help the Frame / Border stretch to accommodate the text...?

Also for some things I might want to have scrollbars (if its a long narration I kinda don't want players to have to click through a bunch of three line sentences - I'd rather they be able to scroll through at their speed-reading comfort. This may prove to be a bad idea, a lot of me says it won't work out.. but I'm curious if there was a solution that could provide that too in the 'text bubbles'

Has anyone done something like this who could suggest how they did it? Or that could link to something I missed during my searching? Does it just seem like a very poor life-choice that I should just avoid as too hard? What's the closest I could reasonably come to doing something like this?

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Ibitz
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Re: Question: Changing textboxes (graphic novel style)

#2 Post by Ibitz »

I did see someone's code that reminded me of your idea, here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=46261

As for anything outside of the above code, the closest I was told that we could do something like that, would be to simply make your VN semi-kinetic, in which you would make pictures like the above, with the text bubbles jumping around and then having a separate text box for you. Otherwise, you've basically come to a similar answer as I have. It seems like there're not a lot of options to constantly customize the textbox.
Image

Ibitz is a self-taught coder/artist who works alone on their games. All games I create are freeware. If you need any help with coding or creating your game, just let me know. I'd be more than happy to help.

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Re: Question: Changing textboxes (graphic novel style)

#3 Post by Imperf3kt »

There's always the option of not using a say window and instead creating DynamicDisplayables.
The advantage of these is you can use ATL on them and simulate a motion comic where the text boxes are usually not static.
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HypnoKitten
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Re: Question: Changing textboxes (graphic novel style)

#4 Post by HypnoKitten »

Thank you both of you - I'll look through both options and see what I can figure out! The top one did look like what I was looking for, though not so much a menu-item thing.. let me see if there's a way of blending the ideas. The little line pointing to who is talking is not that critical.. If I figure this out I'll be sure to post it once I do, just gotta learn how all these options work. :)

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