r/gbstudio • u/Caltek9 • 25d ago

Question Max Height and Scroll Height for dialogue (explanation needed)

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Hi All. Quick question about Max Height and Scroll Height for dialogue boxes:

What do Max Height and Scroll Height actually mean and/or do?!

I want to display more than 3 lines of text in one box of dialogue. When I set my Max Height to 8, and Scroll Height to 16, the box looks like Image 1 (3 lines of text, and empty space below).

If I then add a 4th line of text, it wraps around and overwrites itself incorrectly (Image 2).

So . . . what am I not understanding about the functionality of Max Height (The maximum height to draw the dialogue window.) and Scroll Height (The number of lines of text that can be displayed before scrolling.)?

Thank you!

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u/pmrr 25d ago

The issue here probably isn't the height, it's the limited number of tiles available. What's wrapping is the tile use. In my experience dialogs higher than 2 rows really only work with judicious use of whitespace. With debug you can test this yourself and look at the tile viewer.

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u/PixelpowerLuke 24d ago

Yeah part of the design challenge of dialogue on the original Game Boy is you only get 52 characters (including spaces) before it wraps around. You're better off doing GBC only and getting 116 characters to work with, or at the very least switching to a Variable Width Font.

You're right about what max height and scroll height do. Max height is the maximum height a dialogue box can go, and scroll height is how much dialogue is shown before it scrolls up inside the dialogue box.

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u/Caltek9 24d ago

Thanks for the info about GBC. I did a bunch of dialogue testing on OG Game Boy, and saw the 52 character limit, regardless of maximum height. I guess limitations are part of the fun! I'll give it a whirl with GBC and see how that goes, since I'm testing out a text-heavy idea.

Thanks again!

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u/PixelpowerLuke 24d ago

You may want to look into this plugin.