Would this be suitable for part of my games GUI?
I have been researching the best method for implementing my main text display/window (Shows all the world information / output to the player), especially looking for cross platform solutions that will allow me to output colored/styled text in any combination I deem necesarry... (There seems to be so little documentation/info on how GUI/Windowed programs with standard "Console" output windows get that functionality, like most MUD clients that support ANSI/custom coloring, mIRC client with its colored text support, etc..)
It seems like a Scintilla gadget may be the way to go, as it supports syntax highlighting features, and apparently can do multiple Font styles and foreground/background colors (on the same line I think/hope?). I was considering an EditorGadget but getting text colored like that looks like an involved process, that may not be cross-platform.. I also considered a WebGadget, and constantly reloading an HTML file with the new updated data but I have doubts that it will function like I want (scroll up/down with a buffered screen history), or that the refreshing itself wouldn't introduce visual side effects...
Seems like Scintilla gadget may be what I'm looking for.. Not much is said about it in the PB Help except a short example on loading a Scintilla Gadget. However I'm not sure what the difference between what's included in PB and what's in this Static library is... i.e Why would I choose the library over PB's internal gadget?
How easy would it be to learn how to send the appropriate commands to such a Gadget, to color & style text as you wish, on the fly? And one concern I have is that so far all examples of Scintilla gadgets that I have seen, such as the PB Help demo code, and the PB Editor itself, all seem to have a horizontal scroll-bar by default, even when it isn't needed... Can I turn that off for sure?? I only need a vertical scroll-bar for my game, as the display will only buffer a small amount of history for the player to "Scroll back up" if they wanted to re-read something. Can it do word-wrapping once a "defined" width-boundary for the screen is reached?
Hope I'm on the right track with Scintilla
I want to solve this issue early on even though the GUI is only going to be a skeleton for the time being... The only other option I can think of would be to open a windowed screen (from the 2D library?) on my main program window, and manually code the display buffer, word wrapping, and color parsing character by character.. It took me forever to get that far in Dark Basic when I had to do that..
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