Blackboard Entity for impactJS

This is a simple rather limited means to draw text on the screen. My game requires text description during the tutorial phases so this was my solution to that.

The limitations are primarily that the "writing" area is limited at design time. You have a fixed blackboard on which to write. You input as a weltmeister parameter "text" containing your full text. The entity will reflow the text to fit the blackboard.

Tunable parameters of the entity:

rectHeight, rectWidth - the billboard size billboardFrame - white frame around black billboard textFooter - I use this to tell user how to remove pause and billboard fontString - css style font string. default "14px Courier textPadding - space between text and inner edge of rectanagle textLeading - space between lines of text

I'd change these in the javascript entity as I can't imagine you'll vary them over the game's life. If I'm wrong, then connect them to settings :D

To use:

1. Add the lines from this project's main.js into your own main.js. For the update function, it is important that the billboard code come in right at the beginning as its purpose is to stop all other events from happening while we've got our billboard up (and blocking). I commented up the main.js pretty heavily with more details.

2. Drop an EntityTrigger at the point where you want a player's presence to kick off a blackboard. This trigger is an entity from the sample code that comes with impactJS.

3. Drop an EntityBlackboardst anywhere on the level. (I may have noticed some odd interactions with overlapping on other Entities, so you might want to move it all the way to the edge -- more experimentation may be required on this point). Set the name of the Blackboardst using the entity settings. We'll call it "bb_example1". Also set the text.1... as needed.

4. Click back to the trigger. Set target.1 for this entity and give it the same name as your blackboard, "bb_example1". You should see a line connecting the two entities now.

That should be it. You may have to tune your text (and possibly your billboard graphic) to work properly. There's probably some programmatic way to have a couple of different sizes of graphic work with various lengths of text, but I haven't needed it (yet).