JA/JO Single Player: The Ancient Art of the Single Player Text Crawl

Tutorial originally created by Shadriss on Map-Review and posted on 10-22-2003.

Ok, so it's not an ANCIENT art, per se. But it is one that looks daunting to those who haven't the foggiest of where to begin.

So there you are. You have this great idea for a Single Player campaign. You've even gone so far as to write out what you want the text crawl to be. But, like many others, you have no idea how to get it into the game.

Simplicity, friends.

It starts rather simply. Using Photoshop 7, open a new image with the image dimensions of 512 by 2048. Make sure you have selected a TRANSPARENT background. Wow... that's a nice big image, eh? Well, believe it or not, THAT image is your text crawl. Or will be.

Next, you'll need to make a text box that encompasses ALMOST the entire image. I say almost, because if it IS the whole image, you will get a slight warping of the lettering in game. The is especially true if you place the box hard up against the top edge.

Now, in any color you wish (even magenta... I actually had RED lettering in my Text Crawl once by accident...) write out your crawl. The top line or two should be, naturally, the MOD name.

Now, there are a couple of conventions to the text crawl. Many authors out there will just write up a bunch of sentences. This works, but isn't true to form... think about it. Every text crawl in the movies had a grand total of MAYBE 6 sentences. At most, two per paragraph.

So, for starters, you want to try to be as to-the-point as possible. Don't tell the story with the text crawl - let the campaign do that. That's why it's SINGLE PLAYER!

Second, and this one is almost PURELY up to the author, some words should be capitalized. Most notably, these include organization names, such as the REBEL ALLIANCE or the GALACTIC EMPIRE. Important character names and planet names are also in the category, I.E. LUKE SKYWALKER or YAVIN 4.

With those two conventions (NOT rules - it's your mod, after all) write out your text.

OK, that's the hard part. Really.

Save that image as a TARGA file at the highest resolution possible (32-bit I think...). Save it as "tc_engl.tga". Now, in your SPMod PK3 (You DO have one of those, right? If not, refer to Kengo's Tuts on them...) place that file in the "menu/video" folder.

That takes care of the GRAPHICAL element of the text crawl... but there is still the TECHNICAL aspect. Which requires a SMALL bit of scripting.

In your map, make sure that your player_start is enclosed in a trigger_once, and set the key/value to: usescript/"scripts/"modname"/"scriptname". That all you need to do there. Next, bring up BehavEd.

Again, if you are unfamiliar with this program, refer to Kengo's tuts on basic scripting.

The script you are going to write is going to look like this:

//Generated by BehavEd

rem ( "EP1 LV1 Open Cinematic" );
set ( /*@SET_TYPES*/ "SET_CINEMATIC_SKIPSCRIPT", "deception1/mine1open_skip" );
rem ( "THE STAR WARS TEXT CRAWL" );
set ( /*@SET_TYPES*/ "SET_VIDEO_FADE_IN", /*@BOOL_TYPES*/ "true" );
set ( /*@SET_TYPES*/ "SET_VIDEO_PLAY", "jk0101_sw" );
wait ( $150$ );
set ( /*@SET_TYPES*/ "SET_VIDEO_FADE_OUT", /*@BOOL_TYPES*/ "true" );
rem ( "In-Game Cinema" );

Anything after that last line will be for your opening cinematic, should you have one.

Now, assuming you did this all correctly, next time you load your mod and start a new game (or at least the level that you want that script in...) the wonder Star Wars text crawl will wind it's way across your screen, emblazoning your bold words into Star Wars history...