This post shows how to create a menu, use custom fonts, some new triggers types and the functionality of the HUD object.

1. Custom fonts

Several default font type comes with the program which are those that you will find in Windows by default. However these are not all that exciting when creating stories. So I added the ability to add custom fonts to the program which is done in 2 steps.

1. Find a font that will suit the project and install it in Windows by dropping it into the fonts folder.
2. Open the Custom fonts file and add the font name and the path to the list.

After that the font will be available for all future project and can be selected in the font list.

2. Creating a menu and new trigger types

In this case the menu is build using text objects, but it could also have be done using images. Three new types of triggers have been added to the program. A "Save" trigger which will let the viewer save there progress as they watch, play or read the story at a later time. A load trigger which will load the progress and an exit program trigger. These are simply added to the program as any other trigger and have no special options, so they only require to be linked to something that can activate them, such as a Click trigger.

An update to the Go to page trigger have been added, so its now possible to tell it to always return to the last page from which it came. This is useful for situations like menus, character sheets and in general for pages where content need to be reused. When activated the icon change to red, since im using it for a menu i tell it to also create a link to page 2, which will in case that there are no last page, such as when the story have just been started, that it will use this page instead of the last page.

3. HUD objects

In this example i have created a page of what a comic book could look like, all the gray box should of course be replaced with actually images. But in this case it shows an example of how its possible to design the layout before rendering the actually content, so the correct sizes of the images can be decided. As the comic might contain lots of pages. It would be annoying to have to flip through all the pages every time I wanted to get to the menu or if some character sheet was used. So to make this task easy, the HUD object can be used to quickly setup some default controls and will make it so any objects linked to it will appear as if they are part of a HUD and will by default be added to all pages in the project. The HUD tool menu allows for pages to be excluded, so in this example I exclude page 1 since that is where i made my menu and i don't want it to appear there. The menu also allow it to be used as if it was a button, this is done by simply turning on "clickable" and to make it work I hook it up to a Go to page trigger and tell it to go to page 1 where my menu is, so now regardless of what page im on i will always be able to go to the menu.