Occasional Giant Bark

[rykaan]

Hi Tony,

I wanted to know if you've seen this issue before at all?

Giant Bark Text.jpg (436.11 KiB) Viewed 1525 times

Sometimes specific Bark lines appear way too big. From what I can tell it only triggers once then can't be reproduced by just continuing spamming the trigger. It also seems to occur for this specific dialogue line for all the people who noticed it during the recent feedback session I did. I could probably fiddle the dialogue line a little and prevent it, I'd like to know what the actual issue is though.

The triggering dialogue line is "Did anyone get snacks??". It's one of 15 random bark lines that can be triggered when talking to these characters.

Cheers,
Rob

[Tony Li]

Hi,

Does the giant bark end up using the same bark UI as properly-functioning barks?

Does your bark UI's Show animation animate the size of the bark UI or any of its children (e.g., the bark text)?

When this happens, can you pause the game and identify what's getting scaled too big? Is the entire bark UI's RectTransform scaled? Or just the bark text? Or maybe the bark text's font size is too big?

Also feel free to send a reproduction project to tony (at) pixelcrushers.com.

[rykaan]

Hi Tony,

I've had a better look at it, the issue seems to be something to do with the content fitter giving far too much room for the bark than it should, since that's what is controlling the bark's width, image below.

Giant Bark Text with info.jpg (459.79 KiB) Viewed 1520 times

I believe that the issue only occurs if this specific message is randomly picked the first time the player triggers that character's Bark UI. The same message does not trigger it if randomly picked later, and no other message causes the issue when picked first. I have had this issue before and simply changed the message slightly for those instances and it stopped occurring.

To respond to your questions:

The Bark UI is identical on all these characters.
I am using the default show/hide animations built into the Standard Bark UI.
The 'W Delta' value controlled by the content fitter seems to be the problem. The text itself is being expanded to fit the huge area created from the bug.
Give me the thumbs up and I'll send through the reproduction project if this information isn't enough to figure it out.

Cheers again,
Rob

[Tony Li]

Hi Rob,

Try unticking the Horizontal Layout Group's Child Force Expand > Width, and untick any Best Fit checkboxes on any text elements inside the bark UI. If that doesn't fix the issue, please send me the repro project.

[rykaan]

I think that did it.

Cheers Tony.

[rykaan]

Hi Tony,

This is still happening sorry. This is what the Horizontal layout group is set to:

HLG settings.jpg (36.61 KiB) Viewed 889 times

In this thread you suggested to untick the 'Child force expand', and your email said to tick the 'Control Child size'. But the issue appeared again during a test playthrough.

Sorry to bother you with the same problem once again.

Cheers,
Rob

[Tony Li]

Hi Rob,

Sorry to ask this once again, but would you please send me an updated reproduction project? Does it occur seemingly at random, or is there a pattern such as only happening the first time a bark UI is used?

[rykaan]

I just spent 30 mins trying to get it to occur and failed. It happened once in a build of the game rather than the editor. Each time the issue has happened in the past it was the first time the bark trigger on that character has triggered. But whatever caused this one-off might be a really niche issue. I'll keep an eye on it, there's not really much I can ask you to look at as it stands.

Sorry for bumping this thread unnecessarily.
Cheers,
Rob

[Tony Li]

You could try setting a maximum width to at least limit the degree to which it grows. The bottom part of this post explains how I set a maximum width on a similar world space UI.