I posted this over in the BTF with no luck, and other people have had similar problems. I'll post here because it sounds like a bug and I still need assistance.
I'm trying to use the Sierra style portraits and have the option set to "SierraWithBackground", it all seems fine and dandy except it seems to randomise the font colour used i.e. running it one time all the text will be blue, running it another time it might be brown.
I really have no idea why it is doing this, when I switch over to 'SierraWithTransparent' it uses the individual character speech colour, which is what I'd like.
How can I define the colour to be used with Sierra style portraits with background?
Regards,
Maggie
P.S. I am using the current stable release of the AGS editor (v3.0).
What colour depth is your game in?
One workaround may be to use my Hypertext module, as I have to fake the whole portrait thing there in order to get the markup rendered in the text displayed. Basically, I get the character to say a string of spaces the same length as the text and then put my rendered text on top of it.
But that is a somewhat complicated way to do it...
I'll resort to that as a last resort. What about if I created a custom GUI for use with Display text. Would that potentially fix the problem?
First of all, I think you should report this as a bug to CJ (hopefully he reads this, but you could also mention it in the AGS 3.0 thread). I'm pretty sure that the font color isn't supposed to be randomized. Him fixing it in the engine is probably the best solution since it means you can use the built-in dialog editor without resorting to run-script commands to run a custom speech function for every single line of dialog.
Second, yes you could try making a custom GUI and see if that works. But if you do indeed end up using SSH's workaround (not necessarily via the Hypertext module, but the idea of hiding AGS' speech text and parsing the String to a text label or overlay instead), I would recommend hiding the spoken text in another way than using spaces - that will cause problems in case you want to use AGS' lipsync-to-letter function. It used to be possible to set the speechcolor to the magical pink color (or was it just zero?) to make it invisible, but I'm not sure if it still works in AGS 3.0. Alternately you can use an empty font (delete every character in the font editor (http://www.tdrdesign.net/downloads/fontedit.exe)) for the AGS speech, and obviously choose another font for the label/overlay.
With Sierra-With-Background speech, the TextWindow GUI TextColor is used to decide the colour of the text. Is this not working for you?
I'm not using a text window GUI for my game, so it resorts to the default , but the text colour for the speech is randomised every time I load the game, but when I use the Display("Words"); method it is black text on a white background.
EDIT: Here's three screenshots taken after loading the game three separate times, with no changes being made between attempts.
(http://www.sanslife.com/temp/sierra.png)
Interesting, I'll look into it.