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Technical forum / Layered/Dynamic Talk Stances (a la Curse of Monkey Island)
« on: January 12, 2009, 03:02:30 PM »
Hello everyone; so, basically I want to devise a way to generate case-sensitive talk stances for my actor/s during the game, combining three factors:
- Random (or better, phoneme-dependent) mouth shapes sequence, instead of a predefined one.
- Facial expressions (eyes-eyebrows area)
- Body language (pointing, shrugging, arms-crossed...)
Of course, you could just create dozens of different animations for the different possibilities, but I believe there must be a more game economics-friendly way.
You might remember this feature from games such as Curse of Monkey Island, or simpler instances in previous LucasArts games (Sam & Max Hit the Road comes to mind). I've been looking through the documentation about the best way of implementing it, but without much result... Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
BTW, I should post this on the Feature Request subforum, but oh well... I think it would be really cool having a "layer" feature for the sprites; for example, being able to assign a certain "layer id" to a certain subframe and control via code which layers (groups) are hidden and which are displayed. This would make complex animation systems, such as the one I describe, really easy to implement. I hope we'll be able to see something on this lines on WME2!