Creating cutscenes similar to The Last Express?

[Sparkplug.Creations]

Hi all,

I'm interested in creating cuscenes that are very up close and personal with the characters, focusing on their faces and showing a lot of emotion. In what ways can I hope to implement this in an AGS game? I've done a lot of searching on these forums and haven't found a topic discussing this approach yet. If someone can direct me to one that'd be helpful.

The background animation technique is limited to 5 frames of animation, so that won't work. Is it possible to create very large, almost full screen sized "characters" that only show a character from the shoulders up?

Any other solutions?

Also, are this limitations still in effect for AGS 3.0?

600  views
16  loops per view
20  frames in each loop

I can see a need for my game to use more than 20 frames per loop, for example, to show a char talking, wiping sweat from his forehead and then getting very angry.

[Ghost]

You could opt for the large characters; I daresay with modern computers you won't face too much of a speed issue.
For multiple choice dialogs, you could  try Sierra Speech style, which allows you to have portraits- basically that is the same approach, but for dialogs.

[Sparkplug.Creations]

I'm doing some testing now with large images for characters and I see there's an option in the View editor to "Run the next loop to make a long animation." Sounds like that can be a solution to overcome the 20 frame limit per loop.

[scotch]

In AGS 3.0 there are no limits on views, loops, or loop length.

[Dualnames]

So head for 3.0 though if i'm not mistaken it's still on beta phase.

[OneDollar]

An alternative way of doing it: Monkey Island used separate rooms for close-ups of its characters. You could make a new room with a picture of your character's head as the background, then characters/objects for their eyes, mouth etc, and animate them individually. Depends on how much of the face you want to animate, though if you have different features animating individually you can do more expressions with less actual frames.

[Monsieur OUXX]

An alternative way of doing it: Monkey Island used separate rooms for close-ups of its characters. You could make a new room with a picture of your character's head as the background, then characters/objects for their eyes, mouth etc, and animate them individually. Depends on how much of the face you want to animate, though if you have different features animating individually you can do more expressions with less actual frames.

One dollar's solution would be a good approach :
- it saves a lot of space
- it allows you to animate every part of the face independantly, thus creating a lot of realistic facial expressions

the only problem is if you want the characters to be able to appear on several different backgrounds  (and even in that situation, I think it would still save some space), and you will also not be able to synchronize the yes/cheeks/lips/etc without a little scripting.

[Khris]

Different backgrounds are the least of worries here. The before fadein could be used to draw the room's background dynamically.
To animate the chars between dialog lines, don't put the additional frames in the Speechview. By default, the whole loop is shown while a char is talking, which would look pretty odd. You could however use the lip-sync feature to make sure only the first 5 or 6 frames of every loop are used for talking. Then use run-script X / dialog_request / Character.Animate to show intermittent animations.

[OneDollar]

Essentially what we are looking at is it can definitely be done, but more detailed/customisable you want it to be, the more complicated the programming becomes