Multiple Portrait locations (Visual Novel style)

the_dhel

Hey!
I'm currently trying to make a Visual Novel style game with AC. As you may know, all VNs have two or more portrait locations (Left, Right and also sometimes in the Middle). Personally, i want to have two of them, left and right. Is this possible with AC, and if not, what would be a good alternative or addon to this?
I know there is Fungus for unity, however i need more features than Fungus offers, as it is going to be sort of a hybrid VN/HOG/Adventure game.

ChrisIceBox

You can do this by creating two speech Menus that each have the portrait graphic on different sides, and then lock/unlock them using the Menu: Change state Action before you play some dialogue.

ngordon

My own two cents, maybe I'm preaching to the choir, but here goes:

To avoid cluttering your action lists, I would wrap this in a separate action list that I can use to toggle between speech menus. For example, you would have a "ToggleSpeechLeftMenu" action list that unlocks speech_portrait_left and locks speech_portrait_right as Chris suggested above. 

It takes up one node instead of two, it's more readable, and can be extended to as many extra speech menus needed (like the nine alignment modes for menus, for example)

the_dhel

I did try that just now. However, theres a split second where the UI disapears and it spits out a lot of warnings in the console with this method (Cannot turn on menu Menu 2 as it is locked.)

Might Dialogue System be a better option for this sort of UI?  I know it integrates in AC quite well, so maybe this works better for what i need..

ngordon

I was also alarmed by this at first, but these are just Debug.Log messages, not warnings or errors. I don't think this has any impact on game performance, although it can sometimes be annoying as it actually floods the console when trying to debug.

If by Dialogue System you mean another asset, then, well, you've just added another asset to your project... And this asset would provide similar functionality to what you already have in AC with just a bit of customization. Maybe the only valuable extra from Dialogue System is the relationship system, but the same company sells another asset, Love/Hate, that gives you just that for half the price of Dialogue (and also integrates with AC). 

It's your project, it's your call, but I think AC has more power than meets the eye

Good luck!