I would like to post here a fragment from a PM exchange with the developer -with his permission:
Hello Mel
This will be a long post feel free to put it on the forum if you want.
Thank you for answering my previous PM. I am trying to understand what are the differences between what it can be done with Ren'Py vs. Unity with your plugin and see what can fit better my requirements as I am not a programer. I am doing the writing, the music and the graphics and animation 2D and 3D, but I am still looking to find a solution regarding the programing part, that is not my forte. I was impressed that you seems to be very involved in this project as I was reading trough all those pages in the forum and you bring a lot of the requested features to life very fast and you got my respect for your constructive attitude. Also you are right about the export options in Unity, once a project is done.
There are few things that I do not know, and I would like to ask, please let me know what is possible from what I am asking below:
1) regarding backgrounds, layers & actors. I did not understood what files are supported as background, maybe it is on the site and probably I missed the info. Like .png, Photoshop .psd with layers, .jpg, .gif (animated gif), .tga, .avi .mpg4 (for video), and how it handles Alpha Chanel for transparency?
2) what are the transition and transform options for actors/layers/backgrounds?
Scene Example, regarding the graphic manipulation in the game that I plan to do: I visualize a scene with a picture background, a park that use fade in. An actor slide in the frame and it give a speech. Can it be displayed in a bubble close to character head like in comics? Then the rain starts, or snowing or leaves are falling from the tree. I see this like a layer of animation with alpha that is sliding on top of the previous 2 layers. It can be a loop of 3 frames repeating themselves for a certain amount of of time, let's say 10 seconds. I have the layer that has the eyes and mouth of the actor that change to surprise so I want to animate that expression change for 3 seconds and then revert to original (timer?).
Another actor enter scene (slide or fade in), let's say it is a butterfly and has 2 wing position. I want it to move behind the character and then switch position and come in the front delivering a line of speech in a bubble. Then I want my option box, for simplicity sake a & b, yes & no at the bottom of the screen, on the top layer, using a semi-transparent background. On option one the main background fade out and a background containing a video file (avi, mpg4 etc) will play for a certain amount of seconds. While the background change, I want the foreground layers to stay the same, including the option box semi-transparent layer. On option two, I want the second actor, the butterfly to move out of frame rotating 360* like going away out of control and scaling down simulating the depth of scene. If the player do not click on screen or on buttons a timer should advance to the next scene.
3) In the text capture widget that you mention and it is used like an example of capturing the player name and password, is it possible to enter the text like in a dialog from the player point of view, something like keywords, instead of option 1 or option 2 button?
Something like a dictionary that is referenced when the player enter certain words.
Interactive text capture logic Example:
I have a dog picture on screen. In the text capture field I want to enter a word: "down"
In case the program find it in my dictionary, I have an option to change the actor picture to a sitting dog.
In case the player uses a wrong word the dog image switches to a picture that represent the dog barking and a sound file with a bark is played. An ability to branch decision depending on the player word, first is a positive "sit" answer generating go to frame A, then is a wrong/incomprehensible answer "hello" generating go to frame B, then is the negative answer "don't sit" (anything negative get checked against another dictionary) that generate go to frame C.
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Hi Ocimpean,
No worries about the questions, happy to help!
1) Formats
Any 2D format supported by Unity (practically all of them), Photoshop, PNG, BMP, TIFF, JPG, TGA, etc. Alpha channels are fully supported. Unity converts these image formats into special formats that make them run faster from a graphics card. Animated GIFs aren't natively supported.
With video backgrounds you can do this inside of Unity using "Movie Textures", and you can use LDC to easily activate / de-activate it.
More info on video Textures:
> Video Textures
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/M ... Files.html
2) Transitions and Movements
At the moment, LDC can update actors and backgrounds every time it changes screens (usually when a button is pressed or the timer runs out). Animated Actors are a feature I plan to include in v3.0, although I dont have a final timescale for release yet.
But practically most things you want to do are possible, such as:
- Fade In / Out transitions.
- Actor sliding in and out from the top, bottom, left or right.
- You are able to scale Actors (but currently not as part of a transition).
- You can have multiple background and actor layers (so its possible to add a rain effect over a background, etc).
- You can have actors change expression etc but these are all triggered via buttons or counters. So for example you can have a picture of the Actor in an idle state, and the button could say "Insult", or you could simply have another actor insult him as part of the story, when the next piece of text loads, you are able to change all the graphics, so you can make him have an angry face, etc. On the new dialog line, you can make that expression revert back to idle again. So basically, dialogs can be time driven (via a counter), button driven, or both.
A Good Example of Visual Novel type features (There have been many new features added since I released this):
If you think this is a useful indicator of features, feel free to add this link to the forum thread you were talking on earlier!
> Comic Demo
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/521 ... Novel.html
I even made a tutorial video where I make a simplified version of the above from scratch - feel free to watch it to see how it all works (again, loads of new features have been added since I made this:
> Visual Novel YouTube Tutorial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P734XsgC ... r_embedded
3) Tokens / Data Entry
Yep, that sounds very possible to me! In LDC, you can setup a token to capture user input, then use "Logic" to test what the user wrote and take them to the appropriate screen:
In the above example, you can see we're testing a user's strength and taking them to a different screen.
If you set up a token called "DogCommands", you could use the above to do something like this:
====================================
IF [DogCommands] [Equals] [bark]
go to screen 2
ELSE IF [DogCommands] [Equals] [sit]
go to screen 3
ELSE IF [DogCommands] [Equals] [fetch]
go to screen 4
(... Add as many ELSE IFs as you like. ...)
ELSE
go to screen 5
====================================
This is a super easy way to add basic programming functionality to your games / visual novels! And of course, everything you do in LDC should work on every platform Unity supports (Mac, PC, Linux, Web, Flash, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, etc ) Doesn't get easier than this!
I hope this helps answer your questions!