Dialogue interface with close up image of dialogue participants

  • #1, by trepnMonday, 23. October 2017, 18:06 7 years ago
    Hi all!

    I'm a Visionaire Studio newbie and was wondering if it is possible to create a dialogue interface that uses close-ups of the dialogue participants and that can change the facial expression during the conversation. This dialogue system is used in Harvester, and I believe some other games. 

    Here an example:

    What would be the best approach to achieve this? Should I create an interface and trigger changes based on dialog selections? or should I move to LUA and control it from there?

    Newbie

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  • #2, by afrlmeMonday, 23. October 2017, 18:50 7 years ago
    If you want complete control then I recommend Lua script, but there's a simple alternative. The dev behind "Paradigm" opted for a solution that involved creating scenes for each of the closeup interactions that way they could display the correct close up character as an animation/static image & a relevant scene background & be able to control which animations were played & so on. If you use narration text instead of the regular display text then you can change the animations out as needed or force the animation to play between frame x & y. There are various approaches you could use for this.

    For an upcoming game called "Minotaur" I created a system using a mixture of Lua tables, functions along with called by other action blocks in the editor so that on each new text it would automatically display a specific animation, expression animation & play the relevant voice recording based on the active language. Anyway, my point is that there are many ways you could go about sorting this out, so decide on which you think will be the easiest method for you. wink

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  • #3, by trepnMonday, 23. October 2017, 19:16 7 years ago
    Tnx AFRLme!

    Creating scenes for each close-up doesn't sound like my cup of tea. I guess I'll look into the Lua solution. Would this also require to make my own dialogue system in Lua or would it be possible to combine the existing with lua code?

    Newbie

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  • #4, by afrlmeMonday, 23. October 2017, 19:58 7 years ago
    I believe you could use the existing, but don't hold me to that. I think Daedalic use a mixture of Lua & interfaces to create their close-up talking scenes in Deponia. They lip sync though so they needed complex Lua tables to sync mouth movements & facial expressions to what was being said & in what language.

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  • #5, by trepnMonday, 30. October 2017, 16:52 7 years ago
    I've setup my character head closeup as an interface and want to display it as soon as the conversations starts. I've tried the 'textStarted' event to start but this is only called as soon as the character is actually speaking the text. I would like the interface to be shown on a 'dialogStarted' event, but as far as I can see this is not available. Is there any event based way to do this? or do I have to call this before every dialog?

    Newbie

    60 Posts

  • #6, by afrlmeMonday, 30. October 2017, 18:50 7 years ago
    I should imagine you would have to manually call it before the first dialog, then manually close it after the last dialog.

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