Lively Chat Bubbles and Barks

[Abelius]

Hi there Tony,

It's time to try a thing I never did: using one-line barks with chat bubbles.

And, as I've seen a lot of threads mentioning Lively Chat Bubbles and you even made a support package, I went and bought the thing.

But I might have been too fast... because I don't see the way to use barks with them, instead of pointing to a full convo.

I believe all the instructions given in the forum and the manual page, assume I'll use a conversation, not a bark.

The thing is, I'm also a PlayMaker user, and I'm building the bark string in a fairly complex way (which will get more complex), so I hoped to just use this action, passing the string directly...:



But it doesn't work because, for barks, the Dialogue Actor scripts it expects a DS Bark UI prefab asset being assigned, not a Lively Chat Bubbles prefab or instance.

The only workaround I can imagine to do this would be by setting that string variable to DS, instead. And then using it to start a placeholder conversation that uses the variable as one-shot subtitle.

But... I really don't like that solution. It feels messy. Conversation Start and End events are triggered just for one line, Adventure Creator will enter Dialog Options mode for the duration of the "bark"... it just doesn't feel right and I expect problems with it.

So, maybe it's too much to ask but... do you think you could make barks integrate with LCB?

Or am I missing something here to achieve what I need?

Thank you for your time.

[Tony Li]

Hi,

Sure! I'll add bark UI support for the Lively Chat Bubbles integration this week. I'll post here when it's ready.

[Abelius]

You're freaking awesome. Period.

[Tony Li]

Hi,

The Dialogue System Extras page has an updated Lively Chat Bubbles Support package that adds a bark UI. It's in the "Updated for 2.2.15" foldout. I added a barking NPC to the example scene so you can see how it's set up (which is almost identical to the subtitle panel setup).

[Abelius]

Thank you Tony! I'll try it tomorrow.

[Abelius]

So, three days a small health issue later, I got it working as I like after some personal tweaking.

The only problem I've seen is that the typewriter effect from LCB seems to write outside the bubble, just at the start for half a second. But I didn't want that effect, for starters, so I've created another output profile with no delays, and that doesn't happen anymore. I actually don't know if that issue comes from LCB or DS.

At any rate, thank you so much for taking the time to make this work! It looks nice.

[Tony Li]

I'm not seeing it here, so it might be a script execution order thing in LCB. I just added a safeguard to the LivelyChatBubbleBarkUI's Bark method. If you want to apply it to your copy, add this line to the end of the Bark method:

Code: Select all

if (chatBubble.MessageComponent != null) chatBubble.MessageComponent.text = string.Empty;

[Abelius]

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the mod, although it didn't make the trick for my case.

Instead, the culprit was this...:



The original prefab message text was using a left alignment, and I thought it would be a good idea to set it to center, but it caused the problem when using LCB typewriter effect.

It was starting like this...:



...to end up fixing the paragraph after a second...:



After changing it back to left alignment it's working well again:





So, all good. It was "my fault" for being so touchy.

Ah, and sorry for the NSFW picture of somebody asking for a tropical pizza. I know it's disgusting and it won't happen again.

[Tony Li]

lol I was craving pizza today, but I think that stopped the craving.

If you need it centered, you could contact the LCB dev to suggest it. The DS typewriter effects do it, but it's more work to implement because the effect has to figure out where the line breaks and positioning are ahead of time.