QUESTION: Talking views & Idle

[lemmy101]

Hi all, we're having problems getting our talking anims working properly.

Basically, what we want is to have 3-4 forward facing talking poses, say one with hands on hips, one with folded arms, etc etc. The problem we're having is that the character reverts back to their idle pose (i.e. "SetIdleView, delay 0)) as soon as their line has been spoken. The snapping between the talking pose and the idle pose doesn't look too great, unless we use the talking pose that's the same as the idle pose.

We could turn the Idle anim off, but in that case it uses the first frame of the walking animation, which again causes a nasty snap.

Lastly, we could see a solution of having an idle pose for every single talking pose in the game, but we have fears for the 600 view limit, as we've already hit 100 and can't even be a tenth into the complete game, so don't want to start frivolously creating extra views.

Is there anyway to do this without doubling up our talking views? I was hoping to use the first frame of the talking animation, in the same way as the game automatically uses the first walking frame if no Idle View is set.

Also, as a side note, a suggestion on anims which we would find really useful for doing gestures and anim transitions and such:

Would it ever be possible to have a loop specified as a "transition" loop. where, for eg: Loop 0 of a view was a transition from idle 1 to idle 2, and loop 1 was the idle.

So when you told the character to switch to that view, they would play the transition loop automatically, then start looping the main anim loop. Likewise when leaving that view, you could set up a loop to be the transition out of that anim? I imagine this would lead to more opportunities for more animated dialogue as the character could shift poses and do gestures from those poses smoothly without loads of extra views and script commands needed?

Cheers again!

lemmy

[SSH]

If you are using the dialog editor, no chance. If you are using scripts to do all your talking, then its easy: just create a function that does the necessary transitions and then calls cWhoever.Say instead of using the function directly.

[Misj']

If you are using the dialog editor, no chance.

Shouldn't it be possible to use one of the dialogue-commands:

run-script X
Runs global script function "dialog_request", with X passed as the single parameter. This allows you to do more advanced things in a dialog that are not supported as part of the dialog script.

Then use Character.LockViewFrame(int view, int loop, int frame) setting the view of your character to the first talking animation until it is unlocked again using a run-script just before the character speaks again. But you might see a flicker of idle-view when it's set to delay 0 (or walking-frame 1) when it's unlocked...I have no idea.

[lemmy101]

If you are using the dialog editor, no chance.

run-script X
Runs global script function "dialog_request", with X passed as the single parameter. This allows you to do more advanced things in a dialog that are not supported as part of the dialog script.

Yes, we tried this. Unfortuntately it still rests on having a view with just the idle pose to switch to, and another view with the talking animation itself. Effectively having to put the first frame of each talking pose in a seperate view themselves.

I guess I may be able to fudge it somehow change the frame delay to near infinite to keep it on the first frame?

Cheers for the suggestions,

lemmy

[Misj']

Sorry...I added something to the previous message while you posted... 
Don't know if it will work though.

[lemmy101]

That sounds like exactly what we need

Thanks! I'll give that a go!