Dialogue Functionality Suggestions

[xweert123]

I have some suggestions for Dialogue that would help people (including me) make more professional looking stories. The wto suggestions that stick out to me the most are:

Fades, a.k.a fading from black, fading to black, fading from any colour with hexcode support (ffff00 is yellow, ffffff is white, 000000 is black, etc.), and it'd look like this in the Dialogue txt:

#name "Fadetest"
#participants 1
fade <000000> <1.0> <1.0> <0>
say 1 "I am fading from black."
fade <000000> <0.0> <1.0> <1>
say 1 "I am now fading to black."

It'd work similarly to how everything else works, (like set_character_pos 1 and such), where it says the dialogue below. Now to break it down into parts:

fade <000000> <1.0> <1.0> <0>
This tells the dialogue that a fade is going to be issued.

fade <000000> <1.0> <1.0> <0>
This tells the dialogue what "Color" the fade will be.

fade <000000> <1.0> <1.0> <0>
This tells how long the fade will be held if it's a fade from, a.k.a it holds the color for this many seconds, then begins to fade. (Only works when it's a fade from, similar to Source SDK. If it's a fade to, it'll be the color forever, regardless of what you put here.)

fade <000000> <1.0> <1.0> <0>
The length in which it takes to fade from the entire screen being whatever color you made your fade, to the actual screen. A.K.A, it takes 1 whole second to fade.

fade <000000> <1.0> <1.0> <0>
The type of fade. 0 is a Fade From, 1 is a Fade To.

There's multiple things you can do with this fade. You can have a fade to that has no fade time, so it instantly goes to black, allowing dialogue to be said with a black screen, then at a certain point in the dialogue it fades to the game, etc.,

It'd be a cool suggestion. The other suggestions I had were interpolating cameras and interactive dialogue, a.k.a you have multiple responses to a character's speech, but those two suggestions seem a little too ambitious, so I settled with the fade one because i've already got it all laid out.

[Silverfish]

Nice suggestion, I think it could be cool as well! The issue with adding in these types of features is that we don't need it ourselves to finish the game. So it would take a bit of time to implement and use it in the game, and then it might not have a big enough impact to be worth the slightly longer development time.

Another I'd like to see is being able to move the camera. You could do so much with color fading and camera movement.

We'll keep your suggestion in mind if we decide to do more work on the dialogue editor in the future, thanks!