Request for advice: different inspect style

[urrmurrmur]

Hi Tony,

I'd like to ask for your opinion on something I've been implementing. In my game, I want regular conversation and inspect text to be formatted differently. We will likely end up voicing all our spoken dialogue lines, but not the inspect text, which counts as internal monologue. In the subtitles, I'd like their to be a visual difference as well (italics for internal monologue, for instance).

What I've done at the moment is defined a style called "Inspect", which I'm using with style markup tags around the dialogue text for each entry. So as follows:

<style=Inspect>This is inspect text.</style>

I would also need to define a custom sequence here, so DSFU doesn't try to load in an audio file like it does for the "normal" entries.


This is a fairly convoluted workflow though, especially since I would never have part of an entry's text as spoken and part as internal. An alternative I've been considering is to define a separate actor for internal monologue for the player characters (e.g. "Robin" and "Robin internal"). Then I could give internal dialogue nodes a different color in the dialogue trees, which makes it more obvious when editing which ones are internal and which ones are voiced. I could also link a separate subtitle panel to these internal actors then, as per this topic.


My question is, do you have any suggestions as to the best way to approach this? Do you prefer either of my approaches, or is there another way that I am missing? Anything I should be mindful of in case I go the route with separate actors?

[Tony Li]

Hi,

You don't need to use a separate subtitle panel.

A simple approach is to wrap your inspect entries' Dialogue Text in [em#] tags, such as:

• Dialogue Text: "[em1]This is inspect text.[/em1]"

Then set the visual style of em1 in the Dialogue Editor's Database section.


If you don't want to have to type those [em#] tags with every inspect entry, you could assign a unique actor (e.g., named "Inspection"). Add a script with an OnConversationLine(Subtitle) method that checks if the subtitle is spoken by the Inspection actor. If so, format the line:

Code: Select all

void OnConversationLine(Subtitle subtitle)
{
    if (subtitle.speakerInfo.Name == "Inspection")
    {
        subtitle.formattedText.text = "<u>" + subtitle.formattedText.text + "</u>";
    }
}

[urrmurrmur]

Thanks, will try that later.