[Announce] Combat Text

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Short Intro
This asset will let you add dynamic text to your game, to create things like the now famous "Scrolling Combat Text" from World of Warcraft or display damage numbers around an enemy when you hit them.

Long Intro
This asset has been in the making for a while, it's been 95% complete and idle on my disk for about two months. I decided to push for the last part over the past day, and it's ready for release. In essence it's a bitmap font engine, which you can design fancy animations to if you so please. There are two distinct parts of the engine, one is for displaying static text - for things like in-world text, name-plates, etc. The other part is for display dynamic text that is displayed either in the UI or in the world as a response to something happening, the dynamic text can be animated, scaled, moved around, etc.

Availability Price
http://u3d.as/content/fholm/combat-text/3a4

Webplayer Demo
A webplayer demo is available right here https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19877504/BattleTextDemo/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html, this is also the demo that ships with the asset package. Explanation of the effects you can see in the demo:

• Switching between nameplates, nameplates can be made to look at the camera or not
• Trigger a notice/announce with a "Finish It!", "Execute!", etc. text
• Trigger damage text which hovers around a character, can be toggled to follow the character or not
• Trigger two "scrolling combat text" arcs on the left and right side of the screen
• Trigger a damage/heal "plume" that is animated in the world above the viking walking back and forth

Video Preview
This is a video preview I did a while back while still working on the asset, so it's not feature complete but a good demonstration nonetheless.

 

Finished up the manual and submitting to the store right now, you can check out manual a head of time if you want:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19877504/Combat%20Text%20Manual.pdf

 

Now live at http://u3d.as/content/fholm/combat-text/3a4

 

Nice. Using the BattleTextSource component:

http://firstearthgame.com/screensho...-Screenshot-AdamTest3_2012-07-31_05:44:02.jpg

- My choice of coloring here causes weird aliasing, I'll fix that.
- The position of the text lags behind noticeably (and rather smoothly) when I move the camera (using mouselook). Is there a smoothing that I can disable? This is the only real issue I'm having.
- A small convenience would be a "no animation" animation option. I made one myself by creating an animation that does nothing for 600k seconds.

Thanks!

 

1) Ok on the aliasing (this should not happen though, what type of interpolation are you using on your font texture?)
2) Make sure the texts are rotated after the camera is re-positioned, you can do this by modifying the script execution order.
3) If you need a static text, use just a BattleTextRenderer, it's explained in detail in the documentation how to build nameplates which are not animated (maybe I've miss-understood you?)

 

1. On the font, I'm just using the Diavlo prefab that was included.
2. Will try, thanks.
3. It lacked some functionality I needed, but looking now I may have set it up incorrectly. I'll try again.

I'll update later tonight.

 

damn fholm... how on earth you have time to do all this is beyond me! good stuff!

.

 

yeah, damn fholm... you're either single or your girlfriend is a nerd

 

Married with one kid

 

On the above:

2. Thanks, script execution order was the solution.
3. With BattleTextRenderer, when I use "Look at Main Camera", then moving the camera side to side makes the text move choppily. Without Look at Main Camera, Lock X Rotation doesn't work, which I want. With BattleTextSource these work exactly the way I want.

Of note: The "NamePlate" GameObject has have the "CombatText" layer when using BattleTextSource, but not when using BattleTextRenderer, a little confusing.

 

Good!

Hm, the text should not be choppy if you have the execution order correct (after the camera moves) for the BattleTextRenderer objects also. I can look into why Lock X doesnt work without Look at camera.

Not entirely true, you can use whichever layer you want, it depends on how you want them rendered ("in the world" or "in the UI")

 

Still working on my understanding of it. Aha, you were right, I hadn't added Renderer objects to the execution order also. That solved it. Thanks for reiterating that, and the support. It's doing exactly what I want now, and with BattleTextRenderer.

(For what it's worth, I'm using this with your controller, slightly modified. Altogether it's a great solution.)

 

Good that it fixed it

Very Cool, thank for your kind words

 

Was looking to do simple 'dialogue bubbles' over characters in a 2d game. Classic 2d text bubble with a character saying a line at various times during gameplay, then disappear till the next event. Would this system be overkill?

thanks,
B.

 

While it can be used for displaying longer texts, etc. there is no multi-line support, so that might be a no for you due to that. Also, if it's overkill or not I don't know, you can use it for a whole bunch of other things too

 

Is there a way to display BattleTextRenderer in screen space? I need it to stay the same size at any distance. (When it's tracking an object; world coords translated to screen coords. BattleTextSource works this way with a Transform source.)

 

I just purchased this and I'm getting a null reference exception on BattleTextRenderer.cs:86 ... renderer and filter are both null

Just for fun I added the following right above 86 and it said the components already existed, and calling GetComponent on them after the AddComponent error returned a object however the text still did not show up.

gameObject.AddComponent<MeshFilter>();
gameObject.AddComponent<MeshRenderer>();

filter = GetComponent<MeshFilter>();
renderer = GetComponent<MeshRenderer>();

 

World of warcraft are using UI not 3D object !

 

Please be more clueless.