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AppGameKit Classic Chat / New user with a few questions

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BlametheJD
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Joined: 13th Jan 2014
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Posted: 13th Jan 2014 17:00
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Hey, I've always been a fan of dark basic products from a number of years ago and have an idea that I'd like to start developing.

I'm going to buy the app game kit and book later this month so I apologize if some of the questions I ask are answered there.

I'm not looking to make a game, but a visual library consisting of user added text - nothing to complicated. It will be a 2d library resembling apple/Amazon's eBook store.

So I'm basically just looking for some advice on how this gdk could assist me in the creation of this and if there is anything I should keep in mind I'm drawing up all the art work now so that once I have the program I just need to set it up and allow it to accept and store text in a organized fashion.

I'll explain the purpose of the idea as I make progress and start a project thread
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baxslash
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Posted: 13th Jan 2014 18:18
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There are some pretty good text and string commands that can be used for this but I haven't tried using them to this extent. The most I've done is to parse a relatively large text file and make the text fit a set width. The single text object was then scrolled using touch. It was for a terms & conditions page in an app.

The biggest problem I encountered was the time it took to parse and create the text object which was not a particularly large issue but I would suggest it would be easier and faster to load text which was already formatted with line breaks etc so all you need to do (for example) is load a single text file per page as you need it. That would most likely be the fastest way.

Another issue is finding a good font as some don't scale very well but that's not a major issue either.

Good luck!

oct(31) = dec(25)
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BatVink
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Posted: 13th Jan 2014 19:02
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I use similar methods to Baxslash. I reserve indicators like "\\" to indicate I want to break the line.

Individual letters can be adjusted within a text object, and version 2 will also allow you to use tweening on phrases and characters if you need to animate them in an easy-to-code fashion

I have found that it is very easy to pick a font that is too chunky. Thinner fonts quite often work better.

Good luck with it.

ten-net consulting limited
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BlametheJD
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Posted: 13th Jan 2014 22:48
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Thanks guys I really appreciate the advice

I think I'm going to center this library on a website, which is were the servers will store all the text, possibly files/pics, where the mobile and desktop apps only have to pull the info from the server, as well as send the server new text.

I'm going to use a database to store log in info so I just need to make everything work together.
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Van B
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Posted: 13th Jan 2014 23:32
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I think that having each page as a seperate text entity would be a good idea, maybe even have the next and previous pages ready to go. Like, if your showing page 5, use text entities for pages 4 and 6 as well, and if the user changes page, then you will be able to display the new page right away, then set the pages again. Maybe having 3 text objects and 3 sprites. Any images that you want to include can be loaded in and displayed as sprites. I think the main thing is to keep the text at a reasonable size - making 1 massive text object for a whole book is probably a bad idea, so chop it into pages, and treat each page as a seperate text entity. Should be fairly smooth that way.

I added books to myself and Cliff M's project Eat Drink Slay, I use a tiny bitmap font and memblocks to make page images, then flick between 3D pages, but it's much the same principle - loading a whole book does take a while!, but it's pretty cool. I just use a code tag to enforce page breaks and images. I'm not sure how fast that would be with a high resolution font, probably far too slow, but with AGKv2 the render to image system might make things much faster.
Screenshot of my book effect here:
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/xt/xt_apollo_pic.php?i=2491915

I am the one who knocks...
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Naphier
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Posted: 13th Jan 2014 23:47
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I use non-printable characters as separators for text (i.e. Chr(31)). There are quite a few available if you look at
http://www.asciitable.com/

You should probably spend a bit of time with your fonts. The AppGameKit font packages are OK, but as has been said, they don't scale all that well. Even if you use SetGenerateMipmap they still get shifted a little and have some odd artifacts. And they look really bad when scaled too small such as on iPhone 3GS or similar low-res devices.
So you'll want to spend a lot of time optimizing font images. I know I'm going to spend a bit more time on the one I use for Wordspionage because I'm not all too happy with it.

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BlametheJD
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Posted: 14th Jan 2014 00:32
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Ok perfect thanks everyone for the advice.

I think my next step will be to finish the artwork and then I will make a break down of each text category or field that will be used, and example would be contact info.

I'm going to create the website and database first so that I can focus on getting the mobile app to retrieve and send info between them.

The last poster mentioned optimizing font sizes for low res devices. Do you recommend any methods of creating a format that could be used among a number of different resolutions or would I develop fonts and pictures for each resolution I support?

I think once I have the site up and can show it to you guys I might be able to ask better questions, just don't want to give to much away yet
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Naphier
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Posted: 14th Jan 2014 00:36
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There's a few ways to do it, but I'd suggest either using Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape to create vector graphics for the fonts. Then you can export the font as a PNG in a few different sizes. Vectors are the best way to go and I wish AppGameKit had support for them then we'd have less overhead for those of us that want "perfect" fonts. (or if we just had TTF support would be awesome).

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BlametheJD
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Posted: 14th Jan 2014 00:43
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Sorry about the double post but I can't see my posts yet and I wanted to add something.

Because I want all of these platforms to be connected and always updated, I think I'm going to have the web servers responsible for creating images instead of every device displaying text.

So when you submit a text form to the website, it will merge the text into a picture for background purposes and will send the image back to the device. The text images will take up the majority of the screen space. I will have to add margins to the picture, provide word wrapping, and supply a supplementary text file so images remain searchable. This way every device will display the most up to date text since it all comes back from their web account.

Does this sound practical? There won't be a lot of updating text. The program is all in the set up and later being able to look at everything in a convenient way. Searching words within these texts would be ideal though.
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BatVink
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Posted: 14th Jan 2014 08:48
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How will your users be accessing the site? By mobile on a data connection? Text is a few bytes whereas images could be 10s or 100s of kilobytes. That will affect days usage and more importantly, speed. If you look in the useful functions thread, there are routines for formatting and wrapping text.

ten-net consulting limited
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