Suggestion: AnimateCharacter Addition & Speech GUI Option

[pleasuresuitpete]

Hi Chris!

First of all great work on AGS BTW - I now personally blame you for the delay of my game because of all the nifty new features you've added reccently!  

I wanted to suggest a couple of extra options so I hope this is the correct place / netiquette to do so - couldn't see either mentioned on the tracker...

1. Speech GUI option.

I wanted to try and emulate the speech boxes used in some Sierra Games where the person speaking is listed in the 'title bar' of the speech box.

--------------------
Person's Name
--------------------

Speech

--------------------

I'm not sure if this would be easier to implement as a custom gui where you changed the graphic or as an extension to the DisplaySpeech script.  One way would be to use the script name in the current system, but would it be possible to have something like this...

DisplaySpeechEx (CHARID, NAME, "SPEECH");

Also would there be anyway to play a character animation based on the current direction the player was facing.  I know you specify the view etc when you animate the character but I wondered if there was a simple way of the character picking an object up depending which way they approached the object from.  I'm guessing you could do it with an "IF" statement where you check the direction and then animate the character dependant on that direction,

Does that make sense to anyone but me?

Pete

[Pumaman]

Interesting idea - so it would work like the current Sierra-style With Background speech, but also have the character name as a window title on the text window.

I'll add it to my list.

As for the animation - you can find out the characetr's current loop number iwth the  character[EGO].loop  variable, and use that in a call to AnimateCharacter or whatever.