game developer, yuri enthusiast, your beloved problematic girlfriend


email
christine@loveconquersallgames.com
get an email when I make a new game
news.loveconquersallgames.com/

love
@love

I wonder how many times I've implemented or modified someone else's implementation of a text typer. How many hours of my life have been devoted to the art of typing out text. What percentile of "people who have spent the most time getting text to type out right" am I in. Probably not that high in the grand scheme of things but definitely more than the average person


love
@love

one day I'm going to implement text typing in a given engine for the last time in my life. some people dream of heaven but personally I dream of that day. it's probably not today though


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @love's post:

99% of games (this is an exaggeration) have text typers that just concat one character to a string at a time so that incomplete words abruptly wrap around to the next line once they get completed and it makes me want to tear my hair out

last night i noticed a bug that was causing the width of text in my prose display to shrink for exactly 1 frame so i spent an hour debugging it because i couldn't tolerate the slight jitter

IT'S INSANE I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW COMMON THIS IS EVEN FROM STUDIOS THAT SHOULD KNOW BETTER, IT'S SO FUCKED UP

like the thing is it feels fussy but also: you are completely correct, even a bit of slight jitter really is enough to be unacceptable

the only reason why this isn't my number one bugbear is because there's also still studios out there switching between expressions by fading out the old sprite and fading in the new one simultaneously because they don't understand how blending actually works. so that's worse. BUT IT'S A VERY CLOSE SECOND, DON'T GET ME WRONG

never mind the actual game, (don't) ask me about the hours i spent recreating my text typer effect in FUCKING premiere pro for onscreen text in a trailer video, which despite its million stupid features, has no letter-by-letter typing anim of its own

You would think this is a solved problem and not something that literally needs to be reinvented every time you start a project but also every tutorial you could google has a massive beginner-level mistake in it so bad implementations are perpetuated forever.

in reply to @love's post:

There’s also so many batshit edge cases. I’ve had to fix so many text appearing bugs. A couple of months ago I fixed one of these because the text typing SFX was continuing to play after the text had finished appearing. Turns out it was reading the HTML characters in TextMeshPro alongside the actual text. It’s a lot of string parsing hell!! And if there’s localization… that’s just a whole other hell hole can of worms

Yeah I have had a TON of issues with text layout in Unity. Super excited to be not working with it again. That said, for GITCL I ended up shipping with a modified version of this library for the actual process of text typing, and it's what I just finished porting over to my current C# engine too.

it's such a common problem. I still remember the bit that Derek Yu wrote about it years ago:

Text boxes, for example, are a tempting "hole" for a Burrower to dig into, because they're surprisingly tricky and offer lots of opportunities to explode in complexity. It starts with spending a little extra time getting the text to display character-by-character and break properly between words... before long, the Burrower is working on their own, uniquely-named scripting language that allows text to appear with different fonts, colors, speeds, etc. It's not uncommon to see unfinished games that have only one or two levels in them but extremely nice text boxes!