MI2:SE cursor and S&M (htr) Icon drive dialogues?

glenfx

Hello, It's
been quite some time since I used Adventure Creator, I'm currently working in
the pre-production stage of a game and I wanted to know if I can do a couple of
things with ease so I can see if I can incorporate them into my game design or how
should I approach them instead if it's not possible or easy to do.

.-The main thing I was thinking was about the dialogue system used in
Sam and Max Hit the road, they use icons instead of dialogue phrased options
so I wanted to ask if I can kind of use Images instead of having phrases
for the dialogue selections in AC.

.-The second thing I wanted to ask is if it's possible or if it's a feature already in AC to
have the mouse/cursor interaction like the one used in Monkey Island 2 SE?.
What I mean is holding the right click button and the cursor kind of opens up
displaying the available interaction options which you can select by dragging
the mouse and you have the little arrow pointer rotating as you do that so you
can see what Icon/interaction you are selecting.

.-And I was also thinking about Gabriel Knight 25thA and how they used the
character portraits, I remember using a large image as a character portrait
before in AC, but I was wondering if I could use either animated sequences for
the avatar that I could change or animate depending on the dialogue or an
animated 3D character to act as the portrait.

ChrisIceBox

1) Yes, you can assign icon textures to a Conversation's dialogue options.  You'll need to amend your Conversation Menu to display icons, but it's a simple change to the DialogList element's properties.  The 2D Demo makes use of this style.

2) Having icons appear when clicking a Hotspot and choosing from a list of interactions is the basis of the "Choose Hotspot Then Interaction" mode, which is also demonstrated in the 2D Demo.  This normally works by separate left-clicks, but it's options exist to rely on user-defined inputs and respond to holding/release the button instead.  You can also customise your interface completely through custom scripting - see Section 12.12 of the Manual.

3) Not within AC itself, but AC now provides custom events that allow you to inject your own code when common tasks are performed - for example, when a character speaks.  This event scenario is demonstrated in the custom events tutorial.

glenfx

Thank you Chris.

.-I just checked the 2D demo and yes, that 's what I was looking for for the dialogues, I will play with it once I set the base setup. I haven't checked, but is this featured in the 2D video tutorial? (I haven't seen any of the 2D tutorials).

.-For the mouse control I was thinking more like MI2 SE where you have an active arrow that rotates to point to each icon selection while you drag it, though I guess that would be too much effort to recreate and I will go for a standard interaction setup instead.

.-I'm going to see if I can attach the output of a camera pointing to a 3D character to an image or texture and add that to a UI system and control the character through AC.
I was wondering If I can use a camera render texture as an image in AC or if that would be a possible feature in the future? (I don't know if the render texture is a shader or material and I don't know if that can be applied as an image in the menu or interfaces).

ChrisIceBox

1) It's not, but you should still give the 2D tutorial a watch.  To quickly allow for icons in your Menu, you can swap out the 2D Demo's Menu Manager asset (2DDemo_MenuManager) copy it's Conversation Menu (which features icons), and paste it into your own asset.

2) It should all be possible with Unity UI and some custom coding.  The OnMouseOverMenu event can be used to animate a UI graphic when the mouse hovers over interaction icons, for example.  As this can all be changed after your game is made, however, you can always come back to it later.

3) A render texture as an image where, in a Menu?  That's a very specific need, so again I'd encourage custom scripting here in this case.  You'd need to rely on a Unity UI based Menu so that you can update it through script.  A render texture is neither a material nor a shader - it's a texture that can be applied to a UI Image or material, so it should be quite simple to apply it to a UI element.  We can see about pointing you in the right direction with such a script, but I can't see it being part of an official AC change.

glenfx

Thank you Chris

About the render texture, I don't know if my idea is comming through, I was mostly thinking about using render textures as the character's portrait, so instead of using an image or image sequences in the dialogue settings, the render texture could take its place and the portraits could have another dimension without extra coding or having pre rendered sequences, just using the render texture as you do the images, and change the character's animations trough AC actions instead of changing portraits.


So all the facial/emotion animations could be played on the 3D character model that is being fixed to a camera (in a separate scene too I think) instead of using single or animated graphic portraits. This could give room to have a lower resolution player character on screen and have the portraits with higher resolution and details when there is a dialogue, like gabriel knight 25th anniversary.

But like I said, I don't know if the render texture can be used directly as the portrait graphic texture, so that is why I mention it being a feature if it's not posible to plug it as an image texture already.
I'm going to give this a try once I find some free time.



The render textures could also be used in the cursor UI, so for instance instead of the circle image in the "The Walking Dead" UI template it could be changed to a render texture that points to an animated 3D character, something similar to season 3 of telltale's Sam and Max (screenshot bellow). Or instead of the eye icon for "look at", a render texture pointing to a fully animated 3D eye doing weird stuff (that could be prohibited to have in render frames).

ChrisIceBox

The latter can already be done through Unity UI's Raw Image component, and the use of the OnStartSpeech custom event mentioned above to have the character turn their head when hovering over an interaction icon.

Speech portraits don't currently accept RenderTextures in their fields - and I'll have to investigate if that can be changed without unsetting existing textures.  Again this is all possible with custom scripting, but I shall see if things can be at least made easier on the AC side of things.

ChrisIceBox

Early looks into it are promising - it seems OK to make Texture2D fields Texture fields without breaking existing links.  I'll need to look into it more thoroughly, but it could be possible to insert Render Textures into the fields, and then have them display in Graphic elements - both AC and UI driven.

glenfx

Sounds awesome