Pixel Crushers Forum

That probably sounds like a fairly basic issue, but bear with me, I feel like it's deeper than that.

I've been tinkering with cut scenes vis-a-vie the dialogue system for the last few days and I'd managed to whip up an intro that worked fairly well for me. Animated sprites, gently-panning camera, appearing and disappearing dialogue box, the works. Only problem was the text box fade time, which I wanted to eliminate altogether and just have the dialogue pane pop in and out.

I read somewhere on this forum (forgive me, I can't remember where now) that you could adjust the fade time via the Hide and Show animations, and I tried to remove the fade altogether via those .anim files. It didn't quite work the way I wanted, though, and now whenever I start a scene in Unity with an On Start trigger for a conversation every sprite in the scene is completely still. Something about the dialogue system sequencer is stalling their animators completely, and though the dialogue continues step-by-step as normal everyone is stock-still when the scene begins. At most you see a single frame of animation when AnimationPlay() comes into effect.

I've restored Hide, Show, and their controller back to their former states, and re-imported and reset virtually everything else related to the dialogue system, but the sprite animators continue to stall out. It HAS to be the dialogue system, as the sprite animations play properly when it is disabled. (I can also trigger them manually via the inspector, but that isn't very helpful in the long run.) I know the sequencer can act a little weird if it includes commands that are misspelled or are otherwise functionally incorrect, but aside from the animators everything else in the scene carries on as it did before. Very frustrating.

Any idea what might be causing the issue, and what I could do to remedy the situation? Thanks in advance.

(Oh, and aside from this, the dialogue system is pretty sweet. So thanks for that.)

Hi,

Is it possible that something related to the conversation is pausing the game? When the conversation starts, select Edit > Project Settings > Time and look at the value of Time Scale. If it's currently zero, then the game is paused, which could be one explanation for why all of the sprites' animations have stopped.

Side note: By default, the Dialogue System runs in realtime, which means conversations can still play while the game is paused. If you want to change this, set the Dialogue Manager's Other Settings > Dialogue Time Mode to Gameplay. This will make it observe Time.timeScale.

BTW, to get rid of the text box fading, you can just remove the Animator components on the Dialogue Panel and the subtitle panels and response menu panel(s).

It was, of course, something small and stupid. I have no idea how, since I've never touched the setting, but 'Pause Game During Conversation' was ticked on the Dialogue System Trigger. Odder still that it was ticked on TWO such triggers, in separate scenes. I haven't been using prefabs to set those up as of yet so no clue how that happened, but given my poor sleep schedule it's entirely possible I managed the statistically improbable and messed them both up without noticing.

At any rate. Thanks very much for the help. Everything's working again. You saved me at least a day's worth of fiddling and frustration.

Glad to help!