So I’m trying to make use of Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short. Since I’m completely new to I7, I have no idea how to use it. I want to have one of these old school text boxes in the middle of the screen, press space, and then the game continues. For now I even don’t know how to have the player press space.
When play begins:
say "So you've come to hear a story?[paragraph break]".
pause the game.
That’s my feeble attempt, and it don’t work. Furthermore, any hint on how to do text boxes is appreciated. Summary:
How do I wait for the player to press space?
How do I clear the screen?
How do I write a text box?
I’ve read the documentation of Basic Screen Effects, problem is maybe that I got no idea when I may do what under I7. Under I6 it’s just a function call, and I don’t know how to do that under I7.
The last character in the second line of your code should be a semicolon, not a period. Otherwise the rule seems like it should do what you want, according to the Basic Screen Effects documentation.
There’s a section on making a boxed-quotation splash screen in Basic Screen Effects, under the “display the current quotation” section – it relies on “display the boxed quotation,” which is actually part of core I7 (see section 5.12), but it looks like you need BSE to get the quotation to appear and disappear when you want. Here’s the example:
When play begins:
display the boxed quotation
"What's this room? I've forgotten my compass.
Well, this'll be south-south-west parlour by living room.
-- Philadelphia Story";
show the current quotation;
pause the game.
(though it looked like the tabs were funny to me, and I deleted one layer of tabs but I’m not sure that will work. I’ve never used any of this so I don’t know exactly how to make it work.)
Since you are new, I thought I would point out what was probably giving you troubles in your code. The period at the end of your say statement ends the action. As you can see by the code suggested by the others, you need a semi-colon at the end of each line, until you get to the end of that clause. In other words, a period means “full stop”.
If this was just a typo, then just ignore me. I’m a newbie too (I just started last week) and I thought it’s something I would have liked to know, if I didn’t know otherwise.
Btw, you also can do (similar to what IL4 said, if you don’t want to use a boxed statement):
When play begins:
say "So you want to hear a story?...";
wait for any key;
clear the screen.
To tell you the truth, I thought it would be easier than it has been for me to learn I7. I thought, “Great! - An English based programming language, this should be easy.”. Oh boy… was I ever wrong!
It’s so worth the effort, though!