FlxBitmapText and FlxBitmapFont have issues with certain formatting variables.

[glintfishGH]

I've been writing a dialogue system for a game, and I realized that FlxBitmapText and FlxBitmapFont are very finicky.

Variables like charAdvance are just completely wrong, returning the same value for each character (in my case, it was 16). Changing the advance for any character also seems impossible, as changing any value in charAdvance doesn't change the actual advance of the character.
spaceWidth also never seems to do anything when set by the user, since BMText sets it to some other value.

Adding custom characters in code is also a pain, it's undocumented and not very clear. This means that not only can you just not change the advance, you also can't add characters that do what you want them to without loads of experimentation.

[glintfishGH]

Here's a few examples of the issues I had.

this.font.charMap.set(126, this.font.frame.subFrameTo(new FlxRect(0, 0, 50, 50)));
this.font.charAdvance.set(126, 100); // charcode 126 is just the tilde key

This did nothing. I expect it to change the tilde key in the charMap to the first 50 pixel of the bitmap font, but it just did nothing.

---

okay yeah i think something here is bugged
trace(this.font.spaceWidth, this.getCharAdvance("*".code, 0), "*".code);
returns 16,16,42
going into the fnt file and checking the xadvance of the * char, i see that its actually 18

I did end up figuring out how to get the actual advances of the characters later:

for (i in 0...bmText.text.length) {
    var char:Int = bmText.text.substring(0, bmText.text.length).charCodeAt(i);
    trace(bmText.font.getCharAdvance(char));
}

[Geokureli]

is there any reason you're not changing the bmfont file, instead of using code?

[glintfishGH]

is there any reason you're not changing the bmfont file, instead of using code?

What do you mean? Why would I change it?

[Geokureli]

is there any reason you're not changing the bmfont file, instead of using code?

What do you mean? Why would I change it?

For the same reasons you're trying to edit the font's properties in code, as per your examples

Can you explain you're actual goal, here. why do you want to change the char advance of a specific character?