More Output

As I mentioned in the last chapter, you can put as many statements as you want in Scene1. You can also have as many objects in a scene as you want. Let's try do show two text objects in a scene

void Scene1 ()

{

Text MyText ( "Hello World" );

MyText.SetVisible ( true );

Text AnotherText ( "And Hello Again" );

AnotherText.SetVisible ( true );

}

You can probably understand this program by yourself. We are going to have two text objects named MyText and AnotherText in this scene. And we are going to make them visible. But if you try to compile and run the program and preview the cartoon you will see that these 2 text objects are displayed at the same time (at the beginning of your cartoon) and at the same place (in the center of your animated cartoon) and this does not look good. But this is exactly what we asked the interpreter to do.

There is a special instruction (you will learn later that this is also a function) called SetTime for changing time in the scene. If we want our second text object to appear a couple of seconds later then we need to use it like this:

void Scene1 ()

{

Text MyText ( "Hello World" );

MyText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 2.0 );

Text AnotherText ( "And Hello Again" );

AnotherText.SetVisible ( true );

}

As you can see it accepts a floating-point value as a parameter inside parentheses. This is a time in seconds. The statement SetTime ( 2.0 ); specifies that every instruction the interpreter sees after it will happen at 2 seconds after the beginning of a scene in your cartoon. If you want the second text object to appear two and half seconds after the beginning of a scene, then you should specify SetTime ( 2.5 ); instead.

You can try to compile and preview this cartoon but it is still does not perform what we wanted. You still see "Hello World" text for two seconds (because we used SetTime (2.0); and the interpreter automatically changed the length of our cartoon to 2 seconds) but then it stops. This is because we did not specify for how long we want to see the second line of text. We should use SetTime again to change the length of our cartoon to be more than 2 seconds. It should be something like this:

void Scene1 ()

{

Text MyText ( "Hello World" );

MyText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 2.0 );

Text AnotherText ( "And Hello Again" );

AnotherText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 3.0 );

}

This way the our cartoon will be 3 seconds long and second line of text will be displayed beginning from the 2 ^nd second. You can try to compile it again.

But it is still not perfect. The first line of text is still displayed though the entire cartoon. And the second line is displayed beginning from 2nd second. And they are displayed at the same place. We probably want to hide the first text object after 2 ^nd second. You already know how to do this:

void Scene1 ()

{

Text MyText ( "Hello World" );

MyText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 2.0 );

MyText.SetVisible ( false );

Text AnotherText ( "And Hello Again" );

AnotherText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 3.0 );

}

As it was explained before we used MyText.SetVisible ( false ); statement to hide the first text object. It is now perfect! Try to compile and preview it. The first text object is displayed for two seconds and then disappears. Then the second text object is displayed for one more second. The total cartoon length is 3 seconds:

I specially wanted to show you that you can have multiple objects in your cartoons by using 2 text objects MyText and AnotherText . But since you are using only one object at a time and they have all the same default parameters like font and size (you will learn how to change them later), you can use a special method called SetText to change the default text. We can simplify this program:

void Scene1 ()

{

Text MyText ( "Hello World" );

MyText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 2.0 );

MyText.SetText ( "And Hello Again" );

SetTime ( 3.0 );

}

But what if you want to output 2 lines of text at the same time? You can define 2 text objects and make them visible at the same time. But there is another alternative. Actually strings can contain a special line break symbol. It is encoded with 2 symbols – back slash and letter n - "\n" . For example if you want to show "And Hello Again" text below "Hello World" , then you should use "\n" between them:

void Scene1 ()

{

Text MyText ( "Hello World\nAnd Hello Again " );

MyText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 1.0 );

}

This will produce a one second long cartoon with 2 lines of static text. Actually symbol "\" is reserved in C++ to include special symbols like line breaks ( "\n" ) or tabulate ( "\t" ) and some other in the strings. If you want to include an actual backslash symbol in a string, then you must use two of them like "\\" . The example below will show two lines of text for a second and then a line of text with backslash:

void Scene1 ()

{

Text MyText ( "Hello World\nAnd Hello Again " );

MyText.SetVisible ( true );

SetTime ( 1.0 );

MyText.SetText ( "c:\\Program Files\\Web Cartoon Maker" );

SetTime ( 2.0 );

}

The output will looks like this: