I have been clicking since 2003.. and Ive come across somthing that I have been wanting to do for a while now, and just cannot figure out how to do it.
What I want to do, is make a custom window or dialog/text box that has custom borders... and is resizable... for how much text is in it.
For example...
Id like to use a picture that has all 4 corners of a dialog box, plus all 4 sides of the box, and be able to use that picture to create a window with text inside it, that can be any size.
What im trying to avoid:
Having multiple pictures that all look the same, but are different size, but have the same 7 pixel wide border all the way around.
So basically, text blitter, for window borders, I guess.
If you have played the game "The underside" you will notice that the dialog boxes in that game are basically exactly what I am looking for. And they are all generated from one single picture.
Have you looked at the examples that come with the text blitter object? There are examples with speech bubbles, you should be able to draw windows in the same way as the bubbles are drawn.
Well, you could make a foreground layer that has 0,0 as its scale for scrolling, then use the active picture object to paste backdrops on that top layer based on the size of the text to generate the bubble using a external image(whoa that's a mouthful), but that's probably going overboard. The textblitter would be the way to go.
If you look at the flag example of text blitter, it doesn't use the bubble option but could still produce the same effect. The text could be stored something like this:
(------------)
|...HELLO...|
[------------]
And the different characters could be used as different border pictures?