VB Forum / General 2 / October 2004

Your second line of code in effect says: I want to replace whatever is
in Text1.Text at the moment with the string "Second Line of Text", which
is just what happens.

You have several choices.
For a text box, be sure it has MultiLine = True, and ScrollBars = 2
Vertical.
Then you can write
   Text1.Text = Text1.Text & vbNewLine & "Next Line of Text"

For your purposes, a better approach might be
   Text.SelStart = Len(Text1.Text)
which positions the caret at the end of existing text, followed by
   Text.SelText = vbNewLine & "Next Line of Text"
This method saves building an intermediate string.

You could also use a list box, although it doesn't have wrapping of long
lines, with something like
   List1.AddItem "Next Line of Text"
   List1.ListIndex = List1.NewIndex
where the second line keeps the last item scrolled into view.

Is it Adventure, by any chance? "You are in a darkened cave. Passages
lead north and east. There is a stream nearby." Ahh, those were the
days...

That's because you are replacing the text in the window.
With a textbox, the correct way is to set it's "Multiline" property to
True and then:

text1.text = "FIRST LINE OF TEXT"
text1.text = Text1.text & vbCrLf & "SECOND LINE OF TEXT" & vbCrLF

The first line would be a one off. After that, all subsequent lines
have to be added as the second line shows. As a matter of fact the
first line is actually redundant in a real application, as you would
reset the textbox with 'text1.text = ""' when starting a new game.

You'll have to think about how long this game goes for. The standard
textbox for instance have a limit of about 32,000 characters, so if
your game may display more than that, you have to look at using a
RichTextBox instead, which has virtually no limit, it also has some
nice features like colored, bold, italic or underlined text, which you
may find quite useful especially in a game.

However, with both boxes, adding a string to the end of your textbox
with the classic VB method as shown above, requires that VB reads in
the old text, appends the new line(s) and then reassigns the lot back
to the textbox. This will be ok for a while, but after a few hundred
lines of text is displayed, it will slow down your application quite
noticably.

A quicker method is to use the Win32 APIs or even the control's built
in selstart and seltext properties. This also ensures that the box
will be scrolled near the end of the text at all times.
Your code then would change as such. Note this works for both the RTB
and the standard texbox(when set to multiline), but i do recommend
that you use the RTB.

Private sub AddText(sLines as string)
    rtb.selstart = len(rtb.text) 'set caret at end of text
    rtb.seltext = sLines ' add text.
End Sub

And you'd call that with something like this.
Call AddText "First line" & vbCrLf & "Second Line" & vbCrLf

And in case you want to get a bit fancy<g>, this is only for the RTB :

Private Sub AddText(sLines as String, optional color as long = -1,
optional isBold As Boolean = False)
    rtb.selstart = len(text1.text) 'set caret at end of text
    if color <> -1 then rtb.selcolor = color
    rtb.selbold = isBold
    rtb.seltext = sLines ' add text.
End Sub

Call it with :
AddText "hello world" & vbCrLf, vbBlue, False
AddText "Hello world" & vbCrLf, vbBlue, True
Addtext "Hello world" & vbCrLf, vbYellow, True
etc..

HTH :)