Versatility in Dialogue Text

A lot of what I'd like to incorporate in my games is inspired by the Ace Attorney series, with the ability to point-and-click one's way around the scenery very much like the Ace Attorney: Investigations spinoffs (there is an short little official Flash-based demo of the game here, so you can see what I have in mind if you like!).

I'm ecstatic that Visionaire seems to provide every functionality I'll ever need when it comes to that point-and-click style navigation, menus, etc. But the one thing I'm not certain of is how versatile the dialogue options will allow for.

Specifically I'd love these functions (all of them are featured in that demo if you prefer seeing them in action):

• Messages display one letter at a time.
• Accompanied by a "bip bip bip" sound effect. Perhaps variable if I need it - a higher-pitched sound for female characters, a lower one for deep-voiced characters, etc.
• The animation of the character speaking synced to the message. The animation plays while the message appears, and stops when the message is done "typing" itself out.
• Message speed is variable - slowing down the message is good for building drama, and small pauses between sentences or thoughts are a great storytelling dynamic!
• Variable text color - highlighting important words or phrases in other colors to draw attention to them, or using a paler color to indicate when a character is 'thinking' dialogue rather than speaking it.
• Sound effects triggered when certain words are being 'typed out' in the dialogue. Little "bling?" sounds as a character ponders over a certain thought, and the like.

How many of these are possible to finagle in Visionaire? I don't mind learning the nitty-gritty of Lua scripting at all. c:

I know I'm asking for a TON of different little options here and it's silly to anticipate getting all of the answers I need! Even if there are just small suggestions you can make towards getting this functions working (even if it's just using existing functions to 'fake it'), I'd be extremely grateful!

Yes a lot of options

I have already been discussing the possibility of an updated & more flexible dialog system & have already added it as a suggestion to our team issue tracker.

Some of the things you are talking about are similar to how dialogs work in RPGMaker - sounds & letters writing across the dialog box like they are being typed. (I don't know how hard that would be to implement but I could ask)

as for the color highlighting & so on - I do not know as VS currently uses .png image files which contain the font rather than font files themselves - each character that displays text needs to assign a single image font. it would be better if we allowed font files & then added options such as color, bold, italic etc in a similar way to html or bbcode. - you can switch out characters chosen dialog fonts to any other fonts you've created.

you could manually create the font to be displayed in single image frames & then compile them as an animation - in that way, you could add the sounds & control the speed too - but it would be a lot of hard & tedious work!

Daedalic have built lip sync into their games using lua & some custom built tool to generate which mouth image shape is needed based on displayed text or audio file (not sure) We were discussing this, as it would be a nice feature to include

Actually now that I think about it, if the image file for the font contains all the different colours you need (as seen below), you might be able to get around cleverly attaching a different colour with a different keystroke (ALT+0250 for example). Bit of a stretch but it might work. If not, I'm sure some clever lua scripting will solve the problem.

Needless to say you're in good hands with AFRLme. I'm sure he'll magically find a way to solve this problem.

YEAH LOL I'm actually 'upgrading' to adventure games after using RPG Maker for years and years, and I loved that engine's ability to vary text speed and colors by using a backwards slash and a simple command right in-line with the dialogue you're typing.

I did sorta-brainstorm a "fake-it" way to get those bip-bip-bip sounds... since animations allow for sounds to play during frames, I could just incorporate the bips into the talking animation. From there it's just a matter of getting the animation to stop playing when the message is done displaying (it'd still be on-screen but finished being typed-out). Am I on to a little something there or TOTALLY WRONG LOL

And ooh! Another Ace Attorney fan! Hiyas!! I'm interested in this ALT+0250 tidbit you mentioned - I have no idea, is ALT some sort of offset command to tell your font file to 'start' from a different letter block or something? Because an offset like that would be exactly that would work for changing dialogue colors in mid-message.

The symbol ALT+0252 brings up the symbol ü, as in Brütal Legend.

I'm not sure how Visionaire handles extra characters/alt-keystrokes but it's worth trying out.

I think I will add this to the tracker suggestions too! haha, David was (mock) complaining last night because I've already written enough suggestions, updates & feature requests, to cover at least 2 years - apparently - all in between, the bug fixing, updates, platform porting & technical support for daedalic! - ai sus!

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i dont want to de-rail this thread, but could you add a "font for used dialogs" feature to the suggestion list? i didn't find a way to do this, maybe there is a (nice ) workaround already? IMHO that would be a pretty important feature to add...

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yes I will add it to the tracker as I - too - would also prefer to use font files

active font for dialog inactive font for dialog (and then NEW) used font for dialog

in a case the player need to ask the same question more than once (bartenders, etc.), but has a visual feedback if he already used this specific dialog question... its pretty common in almost all games, but i didnt find it in VIS. ("delete dialog after" isnt an option/replacement)

so basically like a html link: font selections for active/inactive/visited

thanks!

if we added actual font files you would be able to declare it easily I should think in same manner as I have in mind for writing the displayed text.

Glad I'm not the only one interested in the Visual Novel aspect of adventure games. Hotel Dusk is another good one on the Nintendo DS, and it has those branching dialogues with indicators to let the player know that they've already asked characters a certain question, etc.

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"but users could use commercial font files without permission & if they are in image format then no permission is needed"

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THAT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE LOL there are even disclaimers in the tutorial saying "This font is from Monkey Island. Don't use it in commercial projects." Fonts are covered by the same licenses as every single other asset you're already using (graphics, music, sound). Seems weird that they make special mention of fonts instead of pointing out that users need to be mindful of licenses no matter WHAT asset they're working on...