Hello. I really liked the new Bitmap Text object, I needed that, but I ran into a problem when I tried it: when the text ends with a newline, the text shown is shifted up. This can be annoying especially for those who use the object for a dialogue system. Attached I leave some images depicting the problem. Thanks a lot!
In this screenshot the text doesn’t end with a newline and nothing is wrong.
In this screenshot the text ends with a newline.
N.B.: These are screenshots of the editor, but launching the game the result is the same.
When you create the BM Font check the line height, or set a width/Height fixed to each letter of the font type.
You can create one with BMFont or Hiero
You will need to recreate the bitmap font in general. In general, here are the settings I recommend for bitmap font creation in BMFont, important ones highlighted in yellow:
Also, ensure you’re including the actual new line character in your bitmap font.
While those empty spaces above and below the characters may seem like extra, in many cases fonts use different spacing widths for different characters, and new lines are a separate character as well. If you don’t include the blank spaces you may be missing the newline character and the engine has to guess.
Just out of curiosity, have any of you ever encountered the same problem?
And if nobody has, can anyone attach a BM Font file where everything works?
Anyway, thanks for your availability.
I also found that ending the last line with a space will shift the text slightly to the right. (e.g. “Test” and "Test " will produce different positions.)
If you use the scroll clipped text function in Yarn, your sentence will always be hopping a little to the right whenever the sentence encounters a space, and it will hop upwards a little when wrapping to a new line. So there is something going on with a “space” character and a “new line”.
Oddly, once the text wraps to a new line, this behavior doesn’t happen for the “space” character, yet the “new line” hop up still occurs.
I am not sure whether my Bitmap font file is not configured correctly (I used the recommended programs to generate it) or if it is something related to the way GDevelop handles it.
Edit: Also make sure when you preview your font file in BMFont that you only have 1 page of characters. If you have multiple pages your export size is too small, as GD5 only accepts one atlas file, I believe. Bump up your export size and ensure everything fits on one image.
Thank you for sharing your BMFont. I have tried it and the space and new line quirk still happens.
To clarify, this only occurs when there is a space at the end of a line or an empty new line. Try adding a space to the single line “Start Game” or an empty new line to the end of the multiline example. You will see the slight shifts to the right and upwards respectively.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem when BMFont is used for labels as you wouldn’t put an extra space behind a word or introduce an empty line for no reason. However, when used with a dialogue system, especially with some kind of typewriter effect/scrolling text where the sentence is redrawn one character at a time, you will inevitably have to deal with spaces and empty new lines during the redrawing process.
Could this suggest an odd behavior with the BMFont object in GDevelop itself?
Might need @Bouh to look at this behavior. While it is a very specific use case, I could understand the need.
I can reproduce this now based off the info above:
This is the font above, with a Bitmap Font object, with the following settings:
Normal (Just “START GAME”)
"START GAME
" (Start game, return key press)
"START GAME "
(Start Game, space at end)
Edit: @GiAnMMV@drearyweary as a workaround for the Newline issue, if you put a space on the newline, it “fixes” the boundary box/placement.
