Ricebug on 20/2/2015 at 18:17
I have the player in a start room. A ghost appears, who has a 3-minute narration. I would like to "close-caption" the narrative--you know--show the text on the screen while the ghost is babbling away. (1) How? (2) What about timing the text to the voice? (3) Can the screen font be sized bigger?
Zontik's King's Story had something similar (I think) but he had no sound files, just text. Different colors for different AI.
ZylonBane on 20/2/2015 at 18:45
Quote Posted by Ricebug
I have the player in a start room. A ghost appears, who has a
3-minute narration.
The question you
should be asking is, "How do I prevent people from showing up at my house and beating me to death?"
Yandros on 20/2/2015 at 18:54
Terry, I'm doing this for all the conversations in DCE, and will be happy to write up a short tut on it tonight when I get home. The timing is probably easier if you split it into multiple shorter WAV files, but it can be done with one as well. Splitting them would be required I believe if you decided to use the new subtitle support which was added in the last NewDark release, as I think you get one string per sound. I had already done it my way in four missions before NewDark added it though, so I'm not going to go redoing all that work.
R Soul on 20/2/2015 at 18:57
One method is to have the AI frob a series of plaques. Split up the wav file into several smaller ones, and have one books\thing.str file for each wav. Set up conv schemas for the wavs and in Dromed each conv line can be 'play LineNo X' and 'frob plaqueX'. If you name your subtitle str files in a certain way, players can easily choose whether or not to use them.
NewDark 1.22 supports subtitles. Check the doc folder. I recently had a go for one of my convs. Here's an example of the first two lines:
Code:
SUB1
{
type "convo"
descr "Fence: "
sub "fc01" { text "Garrett, I know a song that'll get on your nerves." }
}
{
type "convo"
descr "Garrett: "
sub "fc02" { text "I don't have time for this. I urgently need someone to pull my finger." }
}
To enable subtitles, create/edit your fm.cfg file and add the line
enable_subtitles
You don't have to split the sound file up if you use the new sysetm. See the example .sub file for info.
Yandros on 21/2/2015 at 00:29
My technique uses tnhScript's onscreentext, and a single button and script marker, and a single .str file for all the subs for a given conversation, since each frob displays the next page in the file. I'll post a thorough setup in a bit, but you may want to look into the subtitle support as Robin mentioned.
Ricebug on 21/2/2015 at 06:23
Thanks for all the comments and advice. Highly technical stuff. All that Orange Sunshine I dropped in the '60s must have dealt a blow to my IQ, 'cause I can't understand half of this stuff.
ZylonBane on 21/2/2015 at 16:13
...and you think that anyone would find sitting through three minutes of narration to be anything less than excruciating. I don't care if you get Morgan Freeman to read it, by the one-minute mark people are going to be screaming "Get on with it!", or wandering off to make a sandwich.
Thief's mission briefings are around half that length, and even they have images constantly flying across the screen to keep the player's attention.
Ricebug on 21/2/2015 at 17:20
The narrative, at this point, is less than 2 minutes. Besides, some folks hate to read a 4-5 page storyline.
LarryG on 21/2/2015 at 17:58
So maybe find some other way to reveal the back story, or reveal it in smaller chunks throughout the mission. Does it all need to be revealed at once?
Ricebug on 21/2/2015 at 19:20
I'll let the beta team decide.
When Queen released Bohemian Rhapsody, all of the suits bitched that it was too long. No one would listen to a "rock opera," they prophesied. And the rest, as they say, is history.
