At some time when making your game you will need to use text. Text in games is dealt with by using the string functions (a string is just another way of saying a line of text) and GameMaker: Studio
has a complete set of functions that permit you to manipulate strings in many ways, including the insertion of one string in another, the copying of strings and the ability to parse strings for the digits or the letters
that they contain.
It is worth noting that there are certain conventions that you can use when creating strings. You can, for example, create a string with quotes using the single quotation marks like this: "...and so Sam said 'Hi there!'".
You can also force a line break using the # symbol or by adding a new line in the string creation like this:
str = "Hello#World";
// or
str = "Hello
World";
If you need to actually draw the "#" symbol as part of the text, you can precede it using the "\" symbol like this:
str = "this will draw the \# symbol";
Another thing to note is that the unicode character 9647 (▯) is used to substitute any missing glyphs that you may have in your designated font when rendering it in the draw event. So if your font doesn't have, for example, the ° symbol, then writing 90° will actually produce 90▯.
The following list of functions are all for dealing with strings:
- ansi_char
- chr
- ord
- real
- is_string
- string
- string_byte_at
- string_byte_length
- string_set_byte_at
- string_char_at
- string_ord_at
- string_copy
- string_count
- string_delete
- string_digits
- string_format
- string_insert
- string_length
- string_letters
- string_lettersdigits
- string_lower
- string_pos
- string_repeat
- string_replace
- string_replace_all
- string_upper
- string_height
- string_height_ext
- string_width
- string_width_ext
Other than those functions that relate specifically to strings, the Windows target also permits you to use access the clipboard to get and set text information: