Easier portrait switching?

Eastman

Portrait switching. This has turned out to be a really big issue for me as it's a hugely time consuming process when doing dialogues, since I need the characters to change their expressions during dialogue, a lot of the time between each and every line as their emotions and reactions change.

Having to put a Character: Switch Portrait down, hook them up, and change the texture takes too much time. Nodes are great in general, but for small changes you need to do a lot they are not ideal.

So I'd like to make a little (big, really) suggestion as I've had some thoughts on how to make this part of writing dialogues faster.

First thought was to change the Dialogue: Play Speech action to something like this where you enter the expression (suffix) and it chooses the portrait depending on this:

But that didn't seem good enough, because of the super useful treat carriage returns as separate speech lines? option in the Speech Manager. What if I have 5 carriage returns with 3 different expression? That wouldn't work.

Then I remembered speech tokens. What if we could define each characters' different portrait expressions with a script attached to each character, like such:

And then when writing the dialogue you could do something like this?:

ChrisIceBox

A nice idea.  I'll certainly give it some thought - though I can't say for when this might be implemented, as it is quite a challenge.

Eastman

Thanks for considering it!