Hey this is kind of a weird question I know, but does anybody know exactly how many trigger cycles text messages last? I know the amount of characters affects it, but I need to know the full mechanics so that I can properly time unit speech into my nearly finished map. Thanks

sounds like a test map is in order.

In any case, when you do these types of things, it's best to test it out in your map anyway rather than take someone else's word on it.

I assume you already figured out you can make a message last longer by adding invisible characters.
Another thing to do is add a ton of linebreaks to the message so that it fills the entire text box, then you can just spam display it for as long as a death counter runs, it won't "tile" it'll just look the same for the entire duration.

Which has the downsides of not letting any other text display, eg people talking in a multiplayer game.

It's probably better to have one or two lines breaks before the text, to separate it from conversation, and then having the message repeat after the first one should have disappeared.

The exception to this is a cinematic, where everyone is supposed to be watching/reading instead of talking. I recommend always using TF's advice in those situations, ensuring that the line breaks plus text will fill the screen (11 lines), and then displaying it every cycle. Otherwise you will have people talking, distracting anyone from reading your text, and in a worst case scenario someone will spam to prevent anyone from possibly reading it.

I setup a map to test the timing necessary for refreshing messages before, and it wouldn't line up perfectly. If you refreshed on one cycle, you'd still see the previous text for an instant. If you did it on the next cycle, you'd see the previous text disappear for an instant beforehand. You might not find the delay to be noticeable enough to bother you though.

Another option is just display your messages timed by a death count this way you can control the intervals of time yourself.

elaborate.

I imagine what he's saying is to constantly display the text message until you no longer want it to be displayed. (e.g. when interacted with or after an interval of death counts you set yourself)

exactly what inferno said.

Example...

Death counts at least 1 at most 24 display text "Hi" preserve

Death counts at least 25 at most 48 display text "my name is" preserve

Death counts at least 49 at most 72 display text "NudeRaider" preserve

Or if you wanted to allow people to still type you could do it without the preserve...

death count exactly 1 display text "hi"

death count exactly 25 display text "my name is nuderaider"

There is a program called Sea (StarEdit Assistant) which times out transmission durations based on text size.
You can use the Death Count method as mentioned above and have it preserved for as long as Sea recommends for precise timing. However, good estimation works fine too.

It does not look like Sea is currently available on SEN but I can upload it if you are interested.

your first triggers will look like this:


theoretically you could display blank spaces and clear the screen completely, but that rather defeats the purpose of it all, and doesn't solve the question (how long is each character worth in ms).

I thought that was pretty much self explanatory to throw the blank lines in, but thank you for pointing that out for anyone who may not of known. From my understanding of the original post he only wants to know the timing so that he can put a new message on right as the previous one ends. All I did was throw another option out there that allowed him to have the versatility of having the message up as long or as short as he wants which takes the guess work out of timing.

Following rockz' point, exactly twelve lines make up the screen's text field.
Although, it may be different in the traditional StarCraft editor...

To ensure there's no confusion, it's actually only eleven lines.

Wha.. Really? Oh, I have been doing it wrong for years!

Yes, definitely 11.

Except you didn't, because TF- already posted that method while also being more elaborate.

It seems like this is exactly what he was asking to do. Hopefully OP comes back for all this advice..

For the text-message length solution, I've experimented with something like this before, trying to match a map-message duration to player-message durations.

I guess-timated player-message durations to be about 7 seconds, and after testing different lengths, settled at length:140 characters.

This would mean approximately 50ms per character, with the exception of the minimum display time.

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