Display Instructions Techniques

Article written by Aro
Published on 03-27-2004
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Overview

Display Instructions (abbreviated DI in this article) is an effect that enables you to show text on the top of the screen, which is preferred by many designers over using a Send Chat, which only shows a 6-second chat message on the bottom of the screen. This is used in many of the great campaigns in the Blacksmith today, mostly to show dialogue between two characters to play out the entire story.

Coloring Text & Red Bug Fix

Coloring DI text is a feature in Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Expansion. It improves how the DI text looks, as well as who the text is referring too. If the red player says “I win!”, it usually helps identify the source of the text as the red player if it’s colored red. White text can make it anybody’s text. The color choices are the following tags below, which can also be found in the Scenario Design FAQ.

Blue Text – <BLUE>
Red Text – <RED>
Green Text – <GREEN>
Yellow Text – <YELLOW>
Cyan Text – <AQUA>
Purple Text – <PURPLE>
Gray Text – <GREY>
Orange Text – <ORANGE>

Unfortunately, the <RED> DI has a bug that makes a < appear before the text. This can be solved, however, if you put the following into the DI text box:

<..>YOUR TEXT HERE

<RED>

You should put as many spaces after the text as possible – until it can no longer go down any further, but enough so you can put the <RED> tag at the end. What does this do? It removes the <RED> at the end, pushing it down enough so it’s no longer in the visible text area. This is credited to SesameSticks, who had posted this up in the Scenario Design forum at Age of Kings Heaven.

Center and Right


In an experiment, I tried to see how many characters it took in order to get my text on the right side of the screen. I could get as far as beneath the Objective and Civ Chart buttons on the main screen. This was around 191 characters (190 spaces and 1 typed letter) before it finally went to the line below.

According to another test to find out how many characters it took to center text, I got around 131 characters (130 spaces and 1 typed letter). It seems like there’s always one more character added to make sure it isn’t an even number… huh. An infamous example of how the centered text has been used is located in Mark Stoker’s Tamerlane campaign, which used DI in order to act like the player has lost by showing the text “You Have Been Defeated!” in the center of the screen. This imitated the actual defeated sign close to exactly.

In Closing…

There’s many different things you can do with DI as long as you manage to be creative with it. You can have the text flash different colors, have the title of your campaign scroll into view from the right side of the screen, and plenty more. The only limit is your imagination and how many hours you want to work to get all of the triggers working for that effect. Good luck, and I hope this article helped you!