Advanced text and text entry object

I have an idea that would require the option for text entry object to capture multiline strings and a scroll bar to be able to scroll text in the text object.

For example the user may want to write a text includes multiple lines but at the moment it doesn’t seems like I can do that, because if I do + NewLine() to make it start a new line, it doesn’t work because the string in memory is stored as a single line string (I guess). But even if I could do that, the text object would most likely just scale to fit all the text on the screen but in case of very long text it would require a scroll bar instead.

At the moment I’m on the search to see what tool/engine out there fits the best of my needs, because of this limitation GDevelop definitely not going to be one of them, but just in case I would love to see the features to capture multiline strings using the text entry object and the option to use scroll bar in text object to display long text.

Thanks.

Can you not already do this yourself? Just take the input text and seperate it yourself into text objects, placed on top of each other, with a scroll bar at the side to move the camera on that layer up and down.

Probably I could work around as you suggesting but this project need to be able to handle lot of texts and handle well. How to handle text on the screen and inside text objects is the very last thing I want to worry about. In this case I really need something that already can handle large amount of text with no effort so I can focusing on how to store and manage all the text in the background and just push anything on the screen wherever I want without need to worry about how to do it just do it… :laughing:

Also If I can remember, on mobile devices the text entry object in GD doesn’t trigger the virtual keyboard and you also need to develop your own on-screen keyboard to be able to enter text. Basically you need to develop your very own text input system for mobile devices which would be a huge drawback since I plan to target mobile devices in first place.

You might be able to use intermittent (linked) HTML pages with actual forms (HTML 5), then save that data in the local browser cache, then load it from Gdevelop and use some previously saved data to resume where you left off. Theoretically this would work with smartphones also. Of course, those would be text input “scenes” where nothing else is done, at least nothing that needs to be handled by Gdevelop (you could still have background images, css animations or even sounds played using HTML/CSS code alone, the only JavaScript would be to save the content in local cache).

Yes, quite complicated. I’d like to see more text features too, especially for smartphones! :slight_smile:

Thanks.

Thanks for mentioning, it sounds interesting but it would be too complicated for no reason really :stuck_out_tongue:
I don’t really need a game engine actually, it is not a game but an application I need for personal use in first place.

So, if I would try HTML5 forms then I would have no real reason to jump back and forth between GDevelop and a linked page, it would make more sense to try to get the whole thing done without GDevelop using HTML5/JS/PHP/MYSQL… But I have very basic knowledge of these and for that reason I try to find something more “complete” solution that I can use even with my limited skills :laughing:

Could you share a little more about the project idea? I’m not sure if I’ll have a helpful reply for you, but at least I’m interested in what the idea is.

On the other hand, judging from your Gdevelop knowledge so far, if you ask me, you will be doing JavaScript PHP HTML 5 CSS or even the more modern node.js code pretty fast. It’s just as logical (actually sometimes I ask and confuse myself what the execute once and for each object and not using for each does in the background, and don’t usually need to ask myself that in standard code), and the complexity depends entirely on the underlying engine used. There might be many complete JavaScript multimedia, game, and other engines that can do many things by relatively simple commands. Of course you may not have a neat placement editor like in Gdevelop, but… who knows, maybe you will. :slight_smile:

Well, nothing fancy just a database actually.
The idea is that, I want to create “items” and each item can store information that can be entered by the user in to 3 main sections inside the item:

  1. Title
    -just a short, one liner about what the item is
  2. Description
    -detailed description of what the item is about
  3. Item values
    -just a value, can be a number or string or both and it would be dynamic so I can add as many values as needed. The values can fit various purposes depends on what the item is for…

Once an item is created it can be saved in to groups which can be created by the user and each group can hold unlimited number of items. Then, I want to be able to search, browse the items by group, by title and by Item values and I also want to be able to compare values of selected items for different criteria to find the one that fits certain criteria better.

Once an item is selected, it would pull up all the info about the item. It title, it description and all the values that I can modify and save it or even save it as a new item in a different group and I also would like to be able to copy/paste text from outside the app in to the app and vice verse and to export/print any item info on a page.

Finally, I want a home screen and I want to be able to add selected items to the screen for easy instant access…

In Windows, probably an application like Visual Basic might be even the easiest.
Android has something called Android Studio, but it just feels more complex.

For pure web, many people just write the code without using visual editors, and others use something like Dreamweaver to assist them. I don’t know of any free modern awesome WYSIWYG web editors that support all of the features and write relatively neat code.

P.S. Gdevelop should also support this, but yeah, might get complicated.

Thank you for the suggestions :slight_smile:

To be free is not that important actually nor the WYSIWYG editor. Of course I don’t want to spend a lot of money on something I do only as hobby but in case I find something that fit my needs and doesn’t cost more than the price of one or two AAA games, I don’t personally mind the money if it seems useful.
I find it more important actually to provide a complete out of the box experience (require no 3rd party libs and frameworks to mess with) and to be cross platform.

In the past few days I was going through many options back and forth and seems like Construct 2 got most features I need and since I’m already own a licence it is just make it the most optimal choice to go with for this project. But I do have doubts and for that reason I have an alternative option on my list to go with. It is called SpiderBasic which is a Basic like programming language designed for making web applications and it seems to handle GUI and databases pretty good.

Interesting, may be worth checking out. :slight_smile: