The Dink Network

I thought I asked this before, but evidently the submission got lost.

I am working on a new DMOD, and find that I must use wait values of 1000 or more to hold the message on the screen long enough to read it. In my funky little test thingy, I only needed a wait of 200.

If anyone can shed any light on what the difference might be, and how to correct it, I will greatly appreciate it.

RadFrog

1000 is 1 second. 200 is 200 milliseconds.

Make sure that you're using say_stop, and not say. say_stop will hold the message until it disappears, which happens after it times out or after the user presses the space bar.

I am using say__stop, but something is affecting the wait interval.

I will test it on a different computer with a slow processor and see if that changes anything.

Thanks.

RadFrog.

I'm not sure wait(); has any effect on how long your message will stay up. Perhaps if you wanted your message to stay up for awhile you could use two say_stop commands. So when one ends the other begins, thus making it stay up twice as long? Just like this.

say_stop("Blah", 1);
say_stop("Blah", 1);

I think that will make the text blink a bit.

I tried it and the text barely shifts the y coordinate. It is better than nothing though, and it appears to be the only way other than just breaking the message in half.

Hmm, can you post the say_stop lines that you're using? The Dink engine uses the string length to determine how long the text should appear for, but maybe that isn't working in your circumstances.

You can set the time a message is displayed on the screen manually, something like

int &chomp = say("I'll chomp your head in ten seconds",1);
sp_kill(&chomp,10000);

Then you can use loops and wait_for_button commands to be able to skip it normally...

Maybe not.

First - thanks for your replies. It's great that you people have the patience to deal with an incompetent newbie.

I have no problem holding the text on the screen for whatever time I desire. The question in my mind is the value I am forced to use.

In my first sad Demod, a wait_stop value of 200 was ample for the interval. But in my current work, a dialog of similar length reqires up to 2000. I don't want someone with a dissimilar computer to go get a cup of tea while the dialog shows on their screen. So I was just curious as to why I now must use the greater value.

Thanks again.

As was said, the wait(); command doesn't have anything to do with how long say_stop(); commands are displayed, it only determines the time Dink spends doing nothing before the next line is displayed. This time should be pretty much the same on different computers, regardless of processor speed. If something is making say_stop(); lines disappear sooner, it sounds like a rather serious bug. Do things work right in other dmods?