Dialogue skipping

[braytendo]

I love what I’ve seen about this cutscene sequencer, especially the ability to play animations directly, but the one thing that’s kept me from purchasing is I noticed there’s no option available for the player to skip portions of dialogue and voice audio like you can do in most RPG’s. If this isn’t an option included in Slate, would you be able to help me figure out a system to do this? I have no problem coding, but it seems like it would be tricky with this program because skipping sections of a cutscene means that animations will skip ahead to the end instead of playing out and that might be jarring for the player (suddenly a character has appeared all the way across the screen instead of walking there).

I guess I’m basically asking what you think the best course of action to achieve comfortable/non-jarring dialogue skipping would be when using this program.

EDIT: To specify what I’d like to do, here’s a scenario:

Two Characters begin an interaction.

1. Char A says his introduction and waves to Char B while also walking toward him. The dialogue is being shown letter by letter in subtitles.

2. the player presses the continue button and the dialogue is now fully displayed

3. the player presses the continue button again and the dialogue stops showing and the voice audio cuts out

4. if Char A is still being animated as it pertains to the current dialogue, all of Char A’s animations finish playing that should occur before the next section of dialogue begins. In this case, the next section of dialogue would be Char B’s dialogue.

5. If Char A has no animations left to go through or had no animations to begin with, Char B’s dialogue and animation begins (he tells a joke and makes hand gestures, etc.)

or an alternate scenario would be Char A has additional dialogue with additional accompanied animation. Steps 2-5 would still apply but instead of Char B starting, it would just be another section of Char A that can also be skipped in similar fashion.

Does that make sense? Also, does that seem achievable at all while utilizing Slate? Thanks!

[Gavalakis]

Hello and thanks for your interest in Slate!

Slate is a “linear” cutscene editor. What I mean by “linear”, is indeed the fact that when you skip some portion of time in the cutscene, everything that the cutscene affects (animation for example) skips forward as well. Pretty much all sequencers I know of (Unity related or not) works this way 🙂

What you want to achieve is best *not* done using a linear sequencer where timing is deterministic, but rather some other system where timing is irrelevant and things (actions) just take place one after the other time-irrelevant. The node-based Dialogue System in NodeCanvas particularly is able to do this and some people I know have used it for creating such interactive cutscenes where skipable dialogue is also a part of it. Naturally though, it is very different from Slate, since it is not a time-based linear sequencer.

On the other hand, some games I’ve seen treat this animation jumping you mention by clever use of camera cuts, so that each “Skip Point” also has a cut to a new shot. As such, animation jumping is tricked and not seen by the player. This is something that was done in TellTales Walking Dead games as far as I remember. In the next TellTale games, they instead simply opted to make dialogue in cutscenes non-skipable.

Cheers!

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[braytendo]

I suppose another option along those lines might be to only allow skipping during sections where the character isn’t moving from place to place. I don’t think the skipping animations would look too weird so long as the character is standing in one spot.

So I guess for that I would just have to use a variable that I can flip between true and false that allows the player to skip ahead (or not skip ahead). Does slate have an option to change global variables at specific times during a cutscene? That would also really help me integrate it with the ORK Framework asset.

[Gavalakis]

Hey,

There is an ActionClip is Slate that allows you to send a message to a gameobject (GameObject.SendMessage) and as such possible to call some function existing on one of that gameobject’s scripts. The ActionClip also supports a parameter, and thus you can call a function with a bool parameter like it is required in your example.

Let me know if that is that what you mean? 🙂
Thanks.

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/97q2Rjh

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