Text crawls: you've seen them in campaigns, but just how exactly do you make your own? This guide is dedicated to getting you familiar with how text crawls work and how to create one yourself. A text crawl is time-consuming, difficult, and frustrating, but once finished it is a very rewarding component of a scenario.

Step 1: Your Text

Text crawls typically consist of the Star Wars logo (text only, a logo is impossible in Galactic Battlegrounds), the title of the campaign/movie, and three blocks of text, two or three sentences each. At the end of the last block of text, an ellipses (. . . .) is used. And of course, there is the "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . . ." line preceding all of this.

First, of all, before you start your text crawl, write/type out exactly what you want the text to be. Try to make each block approximately equal length.

Step 2: Preliminary Construction

The background of the screen should be black. The text, in blue: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . . ." In the Display Instructions dialog, find the "Number" box and enter the value "2." This makes the text appear in the middle of the screen. (The lowest you can go in Galactic Battlegrounds). Now, the spacing part is really tricky. You need your text to appear in the center of the screen, but unfortunately, there is no auto-centering option. You have to experiment with spaces until you get it right in the middle.

Step 3: The Text Crawl Begins!

After a 10-15 second pause, the famous Star Wars logo shows up on the screen. All you can do is type in "STAR WARS;" you can't make an actual logo. Again, type "2" in the "Number" box. Since the "STAR" is on top of the "WARS," you need to align the "STAR" in the middle of the screen the same way you aligned "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." Then, you need to skip a bunch more spaces until "WARS" is exactly beneath "STAR." Pressing "Enter" does not work! If you recall, the "STAR WARS" logo recedes into the background in the movies, so your next line, the title of your scenario, should replace it instead of appearing below it. This line is fairly straight-forward; just type in the title and align it with spacing. (Don't forget to type in "Number: 2.")

There are two other things you need to do at this step: change to a starry background, (with a Map Revealer 8; since Map Revealers cannot be placed in space, you'll need to Map Copy one from Ykkrosh's Visible Starfield Template and use a "Change Ownership" effect.) The other thing is the famous Star Wars Main Theme. You can copy the Main Theme from your Sound/Stream folder into your Sound/Scenario folder, or use one of the 10+ other recordings of the Main Theme. (My personal favorite is Take 18 of the A New Hope Main Theme.) Remember, you'll have to time your blocks of text so that the text crawl ends at the same time the music does.

Step 4: The Body of the Text Crawl

It gets trickier now. You want your first two or three lines of your text crawl to appear underneath your title, since the words scroll upward. How do you do this? Well, type in your new line of text (more on this in a second) and type "Number: 2." Then, copy and paste your title from the previous trigger, but type "Number: 1" in. This will make it appear above the line below it. Now, for the line below, a lot of trial and error is required. Often this has more than one line of text, so you have to align it and get the line below it to match up (again, all you can do is type spaces.) The two or three lines of text all need to be the same length, so you'll have to adjust the spacing of your words; double-space them, even triple-space them, alter your text so it fits better, whatever it takes.

Step 5: Wrapping Up

The next two blocks of text use the same concept. Remember to set the "Number" value of the previous block to the number before it until the text has gone off the screen (Values - 0, 1, 2). Because timing can be really tricky, you need to use "Clear Instructions" effects once new text stops appearing and the remaining text scrolls up. Once the text crawl ends, the view gradually scrolls down, and then the scenario begins.

You're now done...

Happy Text Crawling!

[This message has been edited by Cerrabore (edited 01-26-2003 @ 11:52 AM).]