Dungeon Master Forum

Would it be possible to extend the time a text is displayed in the text zone?
Maybe with a supplementary parameter for &SAY? or better, with an override operation.

Not conveniently. Have to rearrange several things.
But I am willing to do it. First, however, let us find
out what you want to accomplish. I would not like doing
the work only to discover that it is only half of what
you REALLY want. Maybe you want to be able to
save and review particular text throughout the entire
game, for example. Or keep 100 lines of text and
be able to scroll up/down. OR..........what?

Currently, during sleep, a long text may appear. The player can't even read it because it vanishes too soon.
I'd like to make it stay longer.

OK. Perhaps the text timers should be increased
during sleep. This would make the time that text
appears be independent of whether the party is
sleeping.

I can easily change the time that the engine uses
for all text. But changing it for particular lines
is more difficult. Well, not 'difficult' just tedious
and more likely to have bugs.

> the text timers should be increased during sleep

that would be fine for my needs

I made a Floor Text that displayed 7 lines
of text. All seven were displayed at once,
causing the first 3 to be pushed off the top
immediately. It seems to me that this needs
fixing, too. I'll try to change that. Let me know if
you disagree about this being a problem.

No, I do not disagree.

What is the right thing to do? When 100 lines of
text are produced all at once?

1) Scroll as fast as possible, showing the last four
lines for 10 seconds. This is what the Atari code did.

2) Stop the game action. Show the first four lines,
wait 10 seconds, scroll up the next four lines, etc.
Stopping the game might be annoying.

3) Continue the game action. Show the first four
lines, wait 10 seconds, scroll up the next four lines,
etc. Seeing the text 3 minutes after it has been
generated might be confusing.

4) Stop the game action. Show the first four lines,
wait 10 seconds or until player clicks in the text area,
scroll up the next four lines, etc.

5) ????

I don't know how complex it would be, but for more than four lines, show three lines, with a 'more' as the fourth. If you click the text area within 10 seconds, it scrolls to show the next set of lines, restarting the 10 second count. If you don't, then the text vanishes

Maybe?

If Beo's suggestion is doable, I'd prefer it. If this is not possible, I think that suggestion 3) - displaying every part of the text for 10 seconds and not stopping the game action - is the best. I agree that stopping the game action would be annoying, and 10 seconds should be enough to read four lines of text.

I think these things are fixed in CSBwin98v125.zip.

As there was little interest in this subject, I took
the relatively easy route of simply scrolling
the text in from the bottom and refusing to remove
the top line until it times out. Game play continues
as the text waits in the queue to be scrolled onto
the screen.

as long as I realised, that option is hardly built into v.125. It works when the party sleeps and dont. It`s good, but I made several texts in my dungeon, wchich have to be showed immediatelly - each 0.6 second after previous one (actually, it`s the same text all the time -when the party is teleported from tile to tile, that`s why I dont want delays). Can I turn it OFF forever somehow in the latest version (just like it is originally in older versions)?

I tested the "easy route solution" anf found the same problem:

New texts should immediately push out the old ones, no matter what.

A text should be scrolled only if it has too many lines to be displayed at once (and as long as no newer text happens)

Actually, I doubt that anyone will be happy with
any solution that I implement. I had more-or-less
anticipated this unhappiness. So, when I made
the changes, I rewrote the whole thing so as to
be much more flexible. I'll just keep changing it
until you stop asking for changes.

Today the rule is that a 'new' text pushes out 'old'
text but that mulltiple lines of a single text will each
be shown until it times out.

CSBwin98v126 has the currently requested implementation.