Display speech forever until user skips it option

WillG

Chris,

This is up to you if you feel this should be added to AC, but I did need it for my game. The majority of my game requires the player to skip each dialog and thus I have this option checked true in the speech menu. However I did not want the player to have to click for every dialog during some cutscenes. I would prefer they could just watch the cutscene and not click so much.

Thus via my own custom action I change my own displayForeverOverride variable to the value that is available in the action. I can't just have that action modify the AC's displayForever variable due to this scenario:
        1. We are running the game in the editor and ran an action that changed its value.
        2. Then we quit the editor before running the action that sets it back.

This scenario would cause the AC's SpeechMenu to retain the changed value and thus the next scene would be ran with the new value. To avoid this I have made my own variable that starts with AC's displayForever's menu value. Then it can be changed during runtime via my custom action. This ensures my changes to this variable only exist during runtime and avoid the scenario above.

Anyways, I figured you would appreciate it when people who use AC have to make custom edits to the AC code and would tell you why they had to. In this case I had to change two spots in AC's code to reference my new variable instead of AC's displayForever variable.

I hope you agree that it is nice to have the option to change this value during runtime and thus perhaps in the future I won't have to worry about changing AC's references every time there is an update .

WillG

Oh and the key example of why I wanted this was I have some "Opening scene" cutscenes that happen for awhile in the beginning of a new game.

ChrisIceBox

There's likely all kinds of rare situations where you might want to temporarily change one variable in a manager - adding an "override" setting for one wouldn't be an ideal solution.  I'd say a better way to do it would be to change the referenced Speech Manager itself.  A second Speech Manager would have different settings, that you could swap out.

I'll see about adding some static functions that let you set referenced managers at runtime. A custom Action could then change the Speech Manager to a new one, and back, in the opening Cutscene.

WillG

That does sound like a cleaner way to handle the issue. It would still allow the problem of shutting the game down before the action to set the manager back to the original one is run though. Of which would only be a nuisance during development.

ChrisIceBox

No - the function would only temporary affect the runtime instance of the Manager field - the "main" one would always be the same within the editor.

WillG

Nevermind then, that would be perfect.