Subtitle Portrait graphic questions

perezbalen

Hi

I've been experimenting with the sierra style subtitles with Portrait graphics. And I have two questions I could not answer after a weekend of googling.

1. Games lile Unavowed (I know that's AGS but is the one that came to mind) have the character portrait sometimes appear on the left, and sometimes on the right of the subtitles. How can I do that?
2. When the dialogue has no character, it comes from the narrator. But the narrator has no portrait, and I get a white rectangle where the portrait goes. How do I define the look of the narrator? Can I have the narrator use a different style of subtitles than the characters?

Thanks.

ChrisIceBox

Games lile Unavowed (I know that's AGS but is the one that came to mind) have the character portrait sometimes appear on the left, and sometimes on the right of the subtitles. How can I do that?

There's a couple of approaches - what's the condition to show one style over another?

If it's fixed by character (i.e. John is always on the left, Mary is always on the right), then you can create a second Subtitles menu, restyled for the other side, and then use the Specific Characters Only filter option to limit which characters each menu displays for.

If it's based on e.g. character position (i.e. if John is on the left of the screen, show the left variant), then you can rely on a simple script to determine this, and either:

1. Have two Subtitle menus (as above), and lock/unlock them as a pair such that the correct one is available
2. If the Menu is rendered with Unity UI, alter a single Menu's appearance through e.g. animation

I can advise further, but I'd need to know the condition and your thoughts on the above.

When the dialogue has no character, it comes from the narrator. But the narrator has no portrait, and I get a white rectangle where the portrait goes. How do I define the look of the narrator? Can I have the narrator use a different style of subtitles than the characters?

Subtitles menus can similarly be filtered by narration - so you could have a separate "Narration" menu that only shows lines from the narrator. This would be best if you wanted a Sierra-style UI where the narration was displayed very differently, with no portrait.

If you wanted the narrator to appear with their own portrait, however, you're best off having a "Narrator" NPC that's off-screen, but used whenever you want narration.