Skipping and holding dialogue troubles

Xan

What I'm after: A narrator's question to come up and STAY onscreen while two answer options come up (via a conversation), then it all disappears once the player makes his/her choice. I would like all other standard narration/dialogue to have the ability for the player to skip. To keep the specific question up, I use the [hold] tag in the question.

The problem: This works if I don't have "Display subtitles forever until user skips it?" ticked. But I'd really like to give the option to the player to skip the dialogue because everyone reads at a different pace. So, once I tick 'Display subtitles forever...etc', the conversation options stop working. The options register a click (by changing colour) but they don't go through their sequence in the actionlist. The moment I untick that option in the speech menu, everything works again.

Is there a step I'm missing? I've gone through the tutorials on conversations and the manual a few times.

Note: the way I'm using the conversation is overriding the options in Dialogue: Start conversation (as seen in the video tutorials). Not sure if that has an impact.

ChrisIceBox

If it's a select few questions, an alternative method would be to move the narrator's question text to a separate Menu and set the Appear type to Manual, and then control its display directly with the Menu: Change state Action.

In what version of AC?  If you can post a screenshot of your Speech Manager, I'll try to recreate the issue.  Does this occur if you use the default Demo_MenuManager UI?

Xan

I'm using  version 1.56d and yep same thing happens when I use the demo speech manager. (My speech manager doesn't use anything different to the demo except I have scroll narration on and set to 150). They both work fine when I don't have "Display subtitles forever" ticked.

ChrisIceBox

Thanks for the info - expect a fix in the next release.

Xan

You are a legend

spudnic

Hi, I'd like to follow up on this topic if possible. I'm also looking to create a narrator popup menu that displays narrator text and below it 2 dialogue/button options Yes and No. Yes triggers an actionlist and No exits from the interaction. I've tried 2 methods.

Method 1
Narrator popup menu appear type: Manual, contains narrator speech label and 2 dialogue options.
An Actionlist that runs in parallel 3 outputs. Output 1) Dialogue: Narrator speech. Output 2) Dialogue: Start Conversation. Output 3) Menu: Change State - turn on narrator popup
Problem: When I run this actionlist the menu pops up just fine but the dialogue option buttons are not responsive and nothing can be skipped.

Method 2
Narrator popup menu appear type: When Speech Plays, speaker type: Narration Only. Contains narrator speech label and 2 button elements Yes and No, each with an actionlist that changes a local component variable to either true or false.
A main actionlist that starts a Dialogue: Narrator speech, which triggers the narrator popup menu.
The main actionlist then checks the variable to decide what to do next.
Problem: I understand that the main actionlist is checking the local component variable before the player has even chosen an option, which is why selecting the yes option doesn't trigger the assigned actionlist, but I'm not sure how to make the actionlist wait for player input before checking the variable.

Hopefully this makes sense. I was wondering if any one of these methods are on the right track or if there's a smarter way to achieve this?

ChrisIceBox

To have a DialogueList element sync with the active Conversation, you need to either set the Menu's Appear type to During Conversation, or use a small bit of custom scripting to connect the two manually.

The "standard" way of handling a situation like this is to use the [hold] token as mentioned above. When inserted into speech text, it will cause the speech line to be displayed on-screen indefinitely - until the Dialogue: Stop speech Action is used to kill it.

With this method, there's no need to move both the narration text into the same menu as the dialogue options.

But relying on Button elements to set a variable value is still a viable option. With method 2, it sounds like the only thing you need to do differently is read the variable's value after its set by the Player - i.e. put your Variable: Check Action after the Variable: Set Action that's used in both of the Button elements' ActionLists.