Best Approach to do Text Animation?

By text animation, I mean to display a body of 2D text in an animated way; for example, displaying each letter one by one like a typewriter. 

(The flash on this site is an example of what I mean:  http://www.sitepoint.com/article/simple-typewriter-effect)



I am a newbie with jME, so I'm wondering how to make displaying text more dynamic using jME's functions?  Text animation will be really useful for creating more interesting looking GUI and cut scenes.  Do I need to download add-ons like FengGUI or BUI?



Thank you in advance for reading my post and helping me!  XD

If you don't mind using bitmapped text you can simply create a Node, add the Text to it, and then add a custom controller that would handle changing the text.  You could have a "current text" that is displayed and a "destination text" which is what the end result should be and based on a wait-time between characters the controller could update the current text until it matches destination text.

By Bitmapped text do you mean non-editable text like an image, or text without anti-aliasing?

bitmapped = image



there's a font.png in the jme test data jar (all one word, hyphenated and the like)

It's what draws the FPS.  It's just an image that is spliced to make up the characters with an alphastate applied. It's quite fast but you only get one color and one font size.

the color can be changed and the font size can also be changed (but then make sure you use another font texture)

Well, obviously if you use another texture.  :stuck_out_tongue:

if i remember correctly, the color can be changed without changing the texture.

Right, see Text.setTextColor(ColorRGBA)

…never noticed that before.  :-o