A New Medium for the Scrolling Marquee
Letters in motion, you say? What a splendid invention.
Recently when reminiscing about that custodian of excellent web design that is was GeoCities, I decided to give the <blink> and <marquee> tags a whirl, for old time’s sake. Alas, Safari refuses to recognize these bastions of 90s tastefulness. Tears splashed on my keyboard as I mourned the death of greatness.
And then a user on the Unity forums asked about scrolling text in-game, to which I enthusiastically responded. Browser manufacturers may have made every attempt to kill the non-standard HTML elements so thoughtfully introduced by Netscape and Microsoft, but they can’t take away these innovations from video games. Class will live on.
public float scrollSpeed = 50;
Rect messageRect;
void OnGUI () {
// Set up message's rect if we haven't already
if (messageRect.width == 0) {
GUIContent label = new GUIContent(message);
Vector2 dimensions = GUI.skin.label.CalcSize(label);
// Start message past left side of screen
messageRect.x = -dimensions.x;
messageRect.width = dimensions.x;
messageRect.height = dimensions.y;
}
messageRect.x += Time.deltaTime * scrollSpeed;
// If message has moved past right side, move it back to left
if (messageRect.x > Screen.width) {
messageRect.x = -messageRect.width;
}
GUI.Label(messageRect, message);
}
Stay tuned for blinking text in Unity, for even greater user enjoyment.