limiting Lucasarts dialogue text display positioning

[lemmy101]

Hi guys, was just wondering if there was any way to limit where Lucasart style dialogue is able to appear on a screen?

Say specifying a rectangle of the screen that is allowed to appear, as we have a room with the main character eavesdropping on a conversation in the distance, but due to the positioning of the characters she has their dialogue text over her face for the majority of the time, which doesn't look very good. Being able to budge the text to the left without moving the characters would be brilliant.

Is there any way to do this? Without hacking it with hidden characters with the same text colour? which for various technical reasons would be a right arse to manage across the game.

Thanks!

lemmy

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

You could mess around with DisplaySpeechAt, I suppose.

[lemmy101]

Thanks Rui!

The only problem with that approach is that all the conversations are running through AGX script, not AGS script, so this approach would not work for us without severe changes to how AGX works. I guess if there is no other existing way to limit text position more generally, then I guess this is the answer, I'm assuming it's not really that much of a requirement for many AGS users to take up any more of CJ's time when this method would probably work perfectly well for most people

Thanks again!

lemmy

[Pumaman]

Well, if all your speech is going through AGX, can't you just modify AGX to call SayAt rather than Say, and modify the co-ordinates to your liking?

[lemmy101]

yes that's probably the route to take, but it's a fair bit of work as we don't want to specify locations for every bit of text, adding new functionality to the script editor to parse it, and all the wizard dialogs to take it into consideration. Also since the text is centered and wrapped based on the screen, I was hoping it was possible to effectively change the screen borders so the text wraps as if it reaches the end of the screen.

So basically I was just wondering if there was some existing way to do that, then that'd have been great (I wondered if the edges set in the room editor had anything to do with it, as I've still not figured out what that's for ), but yeah as you say it is technically possible to work this out in AGX so no biggie at all

thanks CJ!

lemmy

[Pumaman]

Well, you wouldn't have to specify a location for every bit of text -- just use a similar algorithm to the default AGS one, whereby you take the character X/Y co-ordinates and place the text area relative to that. Then just override it when you need to.

[lemmy101]

Cool cheers CJ!

[subspark]

This AGX Plugin suite sure sounds like near on the horizon. I can't wait to adopt it into my production pipeline. Congrats to the you and the fantastic hard work you've all put into it. I can imagine it's something we really couldn't do without once it's available. Top stuff Lemmy!

Cheers,
Paul.

[lemmy101]

This AGX Plugin suite sure sounds like near on the horizon. I can't wait to adopt it into my production pipeline. Congrats to the you and the fantastic hard work you've all put into it. I can imagine it's something we really couldn't do without once it's available. Top stuff Lemmy!

Cheers,
Paul.

Thanks though tbh while it's quite usable for TFE development it's still very rough around the edges. We're kinda apprehensive about releasing it yet as it's very TFE orientated at the moment (320x200 only, Lucasarts speech only, etc), and if anything goes wrong or there are any big jobs to do on it only TFE will be held back. We need to make sure all bases are covered before we have the responsibility of other people using it I guess.

[subspark]

Thats completely understandable. I guess once development on TFE has come to completion you will have the time to refine the features and expand on what makes it such a handy tool for developing AGS games.

Keep it up guys. 

Cheers,
Paul.

[lemmy101]

It may well be out before TFE Prologue, I don't know, guess we'll have to see how it goes

Cheers again!

lemmy