Only add NPC's name to their first sequential node?
Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 8:52 am
Hello,
Is there a way to have an NPC's name only appear in front of the first sequential node they "speak"?
I'm trying to achieve an effect whereby an NPC can deliver a long monologue broken into paragraph sized chunks, with their name only appearing at the top of the very first one. A good example would be this scene in Disco Elysium where the character Joyce Messier speaks several clearly separated sequential paragraphs, but her name only appears before the first one: These paragraphs each appear fully formed, as if they were using a version of the Typewriter Effect that distinguished by paragraph rather than character.
I'm not using a continue button but otherwise I'd like it to work the same, ie:
-The first paragraph appears in its entirety
-Then (after an amount of time determined by the Dialogue System Controller's Subtitle Chars per second) the next one appears in its entirety
-etc.
To achieve this I first tried disabling the Typewriter Effect on my Subtitle Text game object, then inserted pipe characters into the monologue. Which just results in all the text appearing at once, albeit formatted. Meaning the player would still have to scroll this massive dense wall of text.
When I hit Split Pipes into Nodes > Process Conversation I achieved the timing I wanted, but now the NPC's name appears at the start of each line of dialogue. This looks kind of clumsy, and will be problematic later because some of my NPCs have spatially formatted text and the indent caused by the name will disrupt it.
Further details:
I'm using the WRPG Template Standard Dialogue UI.
I've switched off "Add Speaker Name" in the Standard UI Subtitle Panel, in favour of having this be controlled by a Dialogue Actor component on each NPC. This lets me change the name colours, have the Narrator's name not appear at all, etc.
Also. incidentally:
I've found I can achieve a kind of "hacked" version of this by turning the Typewriter Effect back on, making the Characters Per Second extremely high, and replacing the pipe characters in the dialogue editor text with "\.". However this feels a little janky, is hard to time precisely (eg with longer paragraphs the per-character typewriter effect is still noticeable), and generally feels like an unsatisfactory solution.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Is there a way to have an NPC's name only appear in front of the first sequential node they "speak"?
I'm trying to achieve an effect whereby an NPC can deliver a long monologue broken into paragraph sized chunks, with their name only appearing at the top of the very first one. A good example would be this scene in Disco Elysium where the character Joyce Messier speaks several clearly separated sequential paragraphs, but her name only appears before the first one: These paragraphs each appear fully formed, as if they were using a version of the Typewriter Effect that distinguished by paragraph rather than character.
I'm not using a continue button but otherwise I'd like it to work the same, ie:
-The first paragraph appears in its entirety
-Then (after an amount of time determined by the Dialogue System Controller's Subtitle Chars per second) the next one appears in its entirety
-etc.
To achieve this I first tried disabling the Typewriter Effect on my Subtitle Text game object, then inserted pipe characters into the monologue. Which just results in all the text appearing at once, albeit formatted. Meaning the player would still have to scroll this massive dense wall of text.
When I hit Split Pipes into Nodes > Process Conversation I achieved the timing I wanted, but now the NPC's name appears at the start of each line of dialogue. This looks kind of clumsy, and will be problematic later because some of my NPCs have spatially formatted text and the indent caused by the name will disrupt it.
Further details:
I'm using the WRPG Template Standard Dialogue UI.
I've switched off "Add Speaker Name" in the Standard UI Subtitle Panel, in favour of having this be controlled by a Dialogue Actor component on each NPC. This lets me change the name colours, have the Narrator's name not appear at all, etc.
Also. incidentally:
I've found I can achieve a kind of "hacked" version of this by turning the Typewriter Effect back on, making the Characters Per Second extremely high, and replacing the pipe characters in the dialogue editor text with "\.". However this feels a little janky, is hard to time precisely (eg with longer paragraphs the per-character typewriter effect is still noticeable), and generally feels like an unsatisfactory solution.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.