Walk and talk

  • #1, by lorenzogasperoniFriday, 06. October 2017, 17:18 7 years ago
    Hi to all,
    i was wandering around to understand if there is a way to let the character to talk and move, essentially for two purpose:
    - do not interrupt the talking after examine an object, if move to another location;
    - permit the character to talk and walk in the cut scenes.

    Thanks!
    Lorenzo

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  • #2, by afrlmeFriday, 06. October 2017, 22:06 7 years ago
    it's a little complicated. You would need to create a walk animation that contains the talk animation integrated into it. You will likely have to use display narration text action part as display text will automatically trigger the talk animation. You could then switch to an outfit that contains the combined walk & talk animation. You would then need some way of listening out for when the text ends to switch back to the regular character outfit, however this will likely cause the character to stop moving & clear the destination position/target. Anyway you go about will likely require some form of scripting.

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  • #3, by lorenzogasperoniSaturday, 07. October 2017, 13:53 7 years ago
    Oh, what a pity. This kind of animation is a typical character movement since the days of Maniac Mansion and Zak. Don't you think should be a simpler way to gain this natively?

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  • #4, by sebastianSaturday, 07. October 2017, 14:00 7 years ago
    currently there is no native walk+talk animation. You have to create a new outfit for the character where his mouth moves when walking or a new animation index in the existing outfits walk animation and change to it to get talking animation. 
    Also you need to use narration text or use the character background text (background text untested because i dont know if the text gets then interrupted because the char walks).

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  • #5, by lorenzogasperoniSaturday, 07. October 2017, 14:16 7 years ago
    Ok, thanks for the replies!
    Best regards

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  • #6, by afrlmeSaturday, 07. October 2017, 15:26 7 years ago
    currently there is no native walk+talk animation. You have to create a new outfit for the character where his mouth moves when walking or a new animation index in the existing outfits walk animation and change to it to get talking animation. 
    Also you need to use narration text or use the character background text (background text untested because i dont know if the text gets then interrupted because the char walks).
    has to be narration text mate as display text background or regular triggers the talk animation of the character. If you click a new destination then it should walk, but I've no idea if the character will get interrupted & stop to trigger the talk animation on new display text. Either way, narration or object text would be recommended in this case depending on how you need it to work.

    As for Maniac Mansion, I doubt they had native animation support for walking & talking at the same time either. The older pixel games tended to create tons of animation variations for every single thing unlike these days where most point & click developers seem to think generic animations are enough.

    Maybe it's something that could be added to the engine in the future, but who knows? I believe it's something that could be achieved very easily using sprite part animations. Currently we have Spine support, but it's a bit too expensive for most of us, but not to worry as Simon is working on adding support for at least 3 other sprite part runtimes for Spriter, Dragonbones & Creature, all of which are really cheap or even free. Hopefully with those he will work on adding better support for runtime functions so we can swap out various spriteparts while the game is running, which would allow you to have you character blink, talk, perform facial expressions or change clothing, etc.

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  • #7, by lorenzogasperoniMonday, 09. October 2017, 12:16 7 years ago
    Thanks for the reply.
    I think that the approach in old Scumm adventures games is to separate the head and the rest of body of characters. Looking at the sprite of Thimbleweed Park (inside the floppy disk of boxed edition) it seems that the way. Probably Gilbert & Co used this tecnique to combine walking and talking animations.

    Can this be a solution in Visionaire studio to manage head and body of characters separately?

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  • #8, by afrlmeMonday, 09. October 2017, 13:42 7 years ago
    Yeah, it should be possible. If you have the character canvas sizes exactly the same & give them both the same animation center value, then you should be able to force the head into the same position as the body, however setting a new destination would force any talk animation to switch to the walk animation & forcing new position (teleporting) would likely force the animation to keep resetting rather than it continuously playing.

    The best solution would probably be to create 2 walk animations in the same outfit. The default walk animation & the walk + talk animation & then swap the character animation index as needed; however - again - the animation index system doesn't always seem to work consistently. I always end up with mixed results when I try using it, which is why I prefer swapping out character outfits instead, which in this case is no use at all as swapping outfit forces the character to stop & clears all destination data.

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