Text engine?

[Pitu]

Hi, pretty dilute and bad question, sorry about that but I'm the furthest thing from a good programmer.
How would I make a text engine for my game? Please don't link me the Shaun Spalding/heartbeast videos I tried them and they are not to my liking and the "super simple text engine" on gamejolt too. I don't require you to write an entire text engine for me can someone just explain how I would handle this? I want it to be very specific like without the box and with sound after each letter is displayed. And how would I store the messages

 

[Annoyed Grunt]

The more general you get the more ways you have to do it, and there is no single true "right" way to do things in programming.
Drawing text is a matter of drawing only part of the string rather than the entirety of it and just expanding the amount of it you're drawing every tot steps.
Making it fit in a rectangular area is just a matter of using draw_string_ext.
Storing messages, you can do in a hundred ways: arrays, lists, even maps.

 

[Nux]

the easiest way to make stationary text would be to use draw_string_ext();
however, scrolling text like in RPGs require a little more coding.

the core things you should need are:

dialogue = "whatever dialogue you want to say";
textSpeed = [whatever speed] * room_speed; // in seconds
currentCharacter = 0; // for finding how many characters in the dialogue to draw
time = 0; // increment by 1 until textSpeed is reached

every step you will increment time by 1 with: time++;
then check if the current [time] is greater than textSpeed, if it is then draw 1 more character by incrementing currentCharacter++;
example:

if (time >= textSpeed)
{
    time = 0; // reset
    currentCharacter++;
}
else time++;

now you have the behind the scenes done, you will just need to draw that many characters using a for loop

for (var chara = 0; chara < currentCharacter; chara++)
{
     // draw character at index chara from dialogue
     var character = string_char_at(dialogue, chara+1);
     var xx = x+(chara*10); // the 10 the spacing, you can use font_get_size (i think) to get an exact value
     // the xx variable makes the characters not be drawn atop eachother
     draw_text(xx,y,character);
}

don't copy paste this since it's an example, but it should give you an idea on how to do scrolling text
I haven't specified how to do lines because that would add a lot more variables and checks. it would involve having a numbOfLines variable, or using a 'flag character' such as # to tell the program when to create a new line. Then, changing the y positions of the characters as well as the x positions