In the lands of niggle

Got the scaling working in a satisfactory manner, the next thing is that the direction of the actor is also affecting the thought bubble so I need to take that into account for setting the x position. More fiddley trial by error coding coming up.

More on the thought

Just doing a bit of work on the positioning, I also need to take into account the scale of the character when working out the position on the Y Axis, that is the next task.

Then move onto the font.

Graphics tools

As always I struggle with the graphics, and am continually trying to get hold of stuff to cover my deficiencies. To that end I have decided to create 3d characters and perhaps some objects in makehuman and blender, then pose them in either blender or Fragmotion before rendering as sprites and using purely as 2d images.

I quite like the cut scene approach of the comic type images, and so have got a cheap graphics tablet and Manga studio to see if I can make that work

Thought Verb

Have implemented the thought verb, I have reused the code from Seraphite, it was one of the later things I did for that project and it works pretty well. It needs some tweaking in respect of size/position and font, and something to flip it to the other side if its too close to the window edge, I think rather than test the window edge I will simply find out if the actor is to the right or left of the screen centre and adjust accorndingly

Regions and actor entry

I have a reasonably clear view on how the scene will pan out now.

There is a trigger expression in the conversation with Alice that will allow access to Tilker Skallion and Foggit.

Traditionally I had always managed these things by using global variables which meant my code was chocking up with globals, even if they were only used in the context of a single scene.

I just worked out(though doubtless thousands have used it before) a new tactic of creating an entity which just has he scope of a scene. This entity can then either be forcibly released or alternatively will drop away once the scene is exited.

this created entity can then hold attributes/properties/ which can have states, This is a great mechanism for recording which conversations have taken place in a scene.

Now I have to bring in a thought verb. I will reuse the code from seraphite for this.

People and places,

I know it seems contrived but I am going to use this scene to introduce a number of major characters, it gets them into the game and will allow me to share information to get the game underway.

The three characters each have an important role to perform in the story.

At the moment the graphics that I am preparing are only place holders,

Here we have Doctor Foggit, the face of the model is finished, but clothes and hair all need doing as well as animations.

More on the response box

Ho hmm after careful consideration using the variable size response box has to be simplified, I have taken a far bit of code away, it's now not quite so sophisticated iro of measuring options line length but it allows use of all the engines rich dialogue functionality.

On the first test it's really working very nicely.

Similar on subsequent tests, in fact quite comfortable with the whole dialogue suite.

I had the initial talk sequence stored in the scene init script, I have just moved the dialogue sequence out to an attached script to allow the conversation  to be picked up   at  a later stage if not completetd.