bge assigning a different material to a selection of text

Question

Is there some equivalent of font.move_select() from bpy that can be used during game runtime?

I'm building a karaoke GUI and I need a way to add a different color/material to the syllable that is currently being played.

I know this could be done having two separate layers of text with different materials each, but I'm looking for a way to addapt an existing code I have built on python's Pillow module.

Answer 1

In BGE or UPBGE 0.2x, there isn't really a BGE equivalent of that BPY function.
UPBGE 0.3x on the other hand, allows BPY to fully works at runtime, allowing you to use font.move_select() in real-time.

You can only assign different materials to individual text characters if you use either the [BGE] BLF module (dynamic) or the you convert your text object to a [static] mesh, but the latter disables dynamic changing of its text.

Answer 2

I managed to get a working version during game engine runtime, on UPBGE 0.3 using only BPY.

Thanks to @Rpaladin for the helpful information to start with.

Here's the code:

import bpy

context = bpy.context
#testtext is a text object with that name. Text cursor should be at the begining of the text before you run this code (in edit mode)
context.view_layer.objects.active = context.scene.objects.get("testtext")
#enter edit mode
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT')
bpy.ops.font.move_select(type='NEXT_WORD')
#The text object has 2 materials, material 0 (first one) is set by default to all text
context.object.active_material_index = 1
bpy.ops.object.material_slot_assign()
#go back to object mode
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')