message WML auto continue? Is this a feature request or idea?

[Wussel]

When I noticed nemaraa using delay on messages I got the idea that an automatic continue feature for messages would be nice too.

Basically I would want the message displayed only for a given amount of seconds. With milliseconds even animations would be possible. Any chance for such a feature?

[Heindal]

You could use [print] for that, as an alternative.

The solution would require this:

message
delay
x

While message and delay should be clear, the "x" could be a piece of code that presses a random button, for example the enter key.
It could be done with lua, but I`m not quite sure if it is possible to do that.

Maybe "print(10)" could be enough, but you should ask the lua community for help with that.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

The user interface system does support this, I believe, so it might not be hard to implement. I'm not sure whether it's a good idea, though. There's not many good reasons to auto-continue messages, because people read at different speeds, so if you auto-continue, there will be someone who misses the message altogether. Synchronizing with a musical score could be one of the few good reasons, I suppose, though you'd still need to be very careful to set the times so that even someone reading slowly can get through it. Synchronizing speech with animations is probably best avoided, but I guess it could depend on the animation.

I don't really recommend using [print] for this, either, as it might be hard to read sometimes (as I recall, it shows the text without an outline).