Request: [pause:x] text token

kloot

I use "Treat carriage returns as separate speech lines" (what a great feature!). But when I want a moment of pause between two lines I have to create a new Dialog:Speech action and specify a "Wait time offset" between the first and the second one.

This makes it a bit cumbersome to do long dialogs and what's more, when exporting text for translation the order of the lines may not export in the same order as in the action list - making it hard to get the context in which the lines should be spoken.

First I thought that [wait:x] would do exactly this, but it keeps the character's speech animation going during the wait. I would love to just be able to add [pause:x] in between two lines and be able to keep them all in the same speech action.

Thanks for listening!

ChrisIceBox

I feel that there would be confusion between the two.

Is your speech scrolling, if so, you could hook into the OnEndSpeechScroll / OnStartSpeechScroll events to update the character's isTalking variable.

kloot

I see, maybe [idle:x] or [waitidle:x] could do the trick?
Nope, not scrolling.

ChrisIceBox

The name isn't the issue - it's the similarity in purpose to one that already exists.

I shall see if it would be appropriate to add some kind of option to prevent animation during this time.

kloot

Wow that would be great! A checkbox in the Speech editor that specifies whether it should stay on talk or go to idle perhaps.

Man, something like that would make working with dialogs in AC a lot more readable both in action lists and when exporting texts, would be crazy appreciated

ChrisIceBox

Actually, coming back to this I'm not sure I'm clear.

If you're not scrolling the speech text, then wait tokens simply delay the finished speech from showing.

The first [wait:X] token in non-scrolling text will cause all before it to show up instantly, wait X seconds, and then carry on. So there's no moment before this time for the animation to show, if you were to pause the animation during the wait period.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're actually doing here is trying to set the delay between two lines entered into the same box, i.e.:

"This is line one.[wait:1]
This is line two!"

The separation time between "return-separated lines" is set via the Speech Manager's Split-line delay (s) field. However, with use of speech event tokens, it's possible to change this value dynamically within the speech text, i.e.:

"This is line one.[delay:1]
This is line two!"

Where "delay" is a token key and "1" is a token value, used by the OnSpeechToken event to update the above field to that value.

See the Manual's "Speech event tokens" chapter for more, but I think this would be the way to go.

kloot

Cool, I can now mimic this:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Amz_vh8OYDX3u78Pv53UBSy-v2oWpQ?e=sgxYcQ

With this:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Amz_vh8OYDX3u78QX_wujMyF1ZwwuA?e=uBTOJe

And the separateLinePause field can be reset to it's default value on EventManager.OnStartSpeech.

Very flexible implementation of Speech event tokens - thanks!