Okay, I have made a special GUI combining the Sierra Icon bar, point total, and "Walk to whatever" LEC status bar side by side. I have found that on things like "interact with pavement" it tends to get crowded, even overflowing its boundary. There is NO room for an additional line, and I am already using the most compact AGS font I could find.
Are there any suggestions, scripting or otherwise, that would help shorten the lines? If not, then I'll probably just rename the really long ones.
By the way, I'll probably edit the bar (so it isn't giving away things about the game) and release it as a GUI file. I think its pretty nice.
What do you want to do? Just chop the end off the string?
You can truncate a string using StrSetCharAt, for example if your max length was 20 letters:
if (StrLen(str) > 20) {
StrSetCharAt(str, 20, 0);
}
Yeah, I was kinda hoping not to have to do that. :( That's why I was asking for recommendations as to ideas. I can prolly script the best answer meself, but perhaps the best solution would be to simply shorten the names of "interact" and "pavement" and such.
Not that it will be much help, but I checked thesaurus.com for synonyms of "interact". Sadly, almost none of them are general enough to be fitting for an adventure context:
collaborate, combine, connect, contact, cooperate, interface, interplay, interreact, join, merge, mesh, network, reach out, relate, touch, touch base, unite
Then again, "use" worked for LucasArts all those years...
Depending on the seriousness of your game, you could use "mess with" for "interact with", that's 4 letters shorter...
Or, but this will hurt many reader's eyes, go for "w/" instead of "with".
In this case, I'd consider taking the status line out of the GUI line and putting it on top or under the other two GUI elements. That way, you'd have the full screen width.
Don't know how well this would fit with your overall GUI design, though.
Use might work, considering this is a pseudo-LEC bar. Thanks
You can see there's not much space. The idea was to make the GUI as small as possible, since its not a popup bar. The cursors match as well.
screenshot (forgive me RJ :) )
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/GUI.png)
I think I reversed the points and text lines in-game, though.
Why don't you just combine Load/Save/Help/Settings/Quit into a single gui?
I've seen many games do it that way.
This way you would only need one button on your gui:
(http://www.strazer.net/ags/edit_holligui.png)
What a big fat DUH!! ::) Can't believe I missed that! :)
Thanks
The ? button will be special, not really "help" per se. It will prolly provide information about the room, so I'll prolly keep that.