Drawing Text with Labels (Mobile)

Contents

• Introduction
• Basics
• Drawing with Labels (Stencyl 2.2 and below)
• Drawing Directly (Stencyl 3.0+)

Introduction

Most games draw text to the screen. In mobile games, this method negatively affects game performance if used in excess, so we use a different method. There are two ways to draw text in mobile games for Stencyl:

1. Directly inside the “when drawing” section of a behavior (not recommended)
2. Using labels (recommended)

Basics

Whichever method you choose, all text drawing involves three main properties

1. Font (to style the text)
2. The text itself
3. Where to draw the text on screen

Drawing Text with Labels (Stencyl 2.2 and below)

Labels are a special kind of actor that can display text. You can specify a font and text to draw for this actor. Like any other actor, a label has a position, rotation, opacity, and can have behaviors attached to it.

We recommend you use labels to optimize your game’s performance. Labels draw text quickly because they change infrequently. The drawback? They require a little more work to set up.

How to Create a Label

1) Create a blank Actor with a blank Animation.

2) Attach the “Label” behavior to the Actor. You'll find it under FROM YOUR LIBRARY > Utilities.

Note: If you're using Stencyl 1.4.1 or earlier, visit StencylForge and search for “Label for iOS” -- Download it

3) Configure the behavior to your liking. (Note: Current versions of the behavior may have more fields than this)

4) Add the actor to the desired scene. If you find it inconvenient that the Actor is "invisible", you can assign a dummy animation to the Actor. It won't display in-game.

How to Change a Label’s Text and Font

The “Label for iOS” behavior comes bundled with some custom blocks that let you change a label’s text and font. Look for them under the Custom category.

How to Move a Label Around

Labels are actors! You can move them around just like you’d move a regular actor around, setting the label’s position, setting the label’s speed, or a using motion tween, for example.

Drawing Text Directly (Stencyl 3.0+)

Draw text inside the “when drawing” section of a behavior, as shown below:

In Stencyl 3.0+, this no longer incurs the heavy performance penalty that was present in prior versions. You can still use labels (via an extension as described in the prior section), but this method is simple and likely the one many will use.

The Future

Drawing text will be simplified in the future for basic use cases. You'll be able to place a label directly in a scene from the scene designer and assign it a font and default text. You'll also be able to refer to it as a regular actor from behaviors.

weilies
in S3.0 does it support multiple line text? text wrap?
0 1 month, 1 week ago

pokemon12
s
0 1 month, 1 week ago

Jon
Losh started a topic here for those who want to localize games. (http://community.stencyl.com/index .php/topic,19118.0.html)
0 1 month, 2 weeks ago

losh
Localisation?
0 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Rubi
how do you update "drawing" scripts, like text=attributes?
0 6 months, 1 day ago

nuclearsheep
can you explain in the "how to change a label's text and font" category, where exactly to put those blocks?

this process is not working at all for me :/
1 1 year, 1 month ago

MerlinoDreamlab
It's possible to have multiline Text, Alignment and something for i18n?

Would like to use iStencyl for some Multimedia eBook iPad app like one we have already created (http://goo.gl/tyvK7)
1 1 year, 4 months ago

majormax
Is there an amount of text you can draw directly before it lags?
1 1 year, 5 months ago

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