Have a Consistently Present Side Image?

[ArizaLuca]

So, I would like to have my protagonist consistently displayed alongside the text, regardless of if she is the one speaking. Is there any way that I can do this? (An example of this would be 'The Blind Griffin' by Asphodel Quartet and 'Valentine's Otome' by Synokoria.

[kivik]

Do you want the image to fade to black when you change scenes? Or will it be ok for the image to show even when everything else fades out?

If you don't mind it constantly being there even across scenes - create a new layer in config.layers: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/config.h ... fig.layers
Here's a bit more about how the layers are used: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/displayi ... html#layer

Depending on whether the image should be on top of everything else, you may want to create one right at the top (last in the list) and show the image on that layer.


If you want the image to fade with scenes, you'd need to show it with each scene statement you use, e.g.:

Code: Select all

scene bg room
show player at side_panel #you need to create the side_panel transform, something like xalign 1.0 for far right.
with dissolve

You could also create a label / function that takes the scene and transition and automatically show the image at the same time, so you can do it in one line of code.

[ArizaLuca]

Hmm, I don't think that's quite right...

[kivik]

Hmm, I don't think that's quite right...

Care to elaborate? That statement doesn't offer anything to allow further help...

[ArizaLuca]

Have you played Valentine's Otome or The Blind Griffin? Those two games give a better idea of what I'm looking for...

[kivik]

I've not played those games, so perhaps you can post a screenshot? The more you share, the easier it is to help...

[ArizaLuca]

https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTkxNjE0L ... qlpkkg.png

https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTk4OTIvO ... PJQVb8.png

Those two are fairly good examples; if you need to you can head to their various websites (just look it up on itch.io) and they'll have some more.

[kivik]

So just to be clear: you want there to be side images for the dialogues, but for it to be the player's image instead of whoever's speaking?

This config variable seems to be what you need:

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/side_ima ... _image_tag

[ArizaLuca]

That seems to have worked; thank you! What if you want to switch perspectives, thereby switching the player image to a different character? Do you know how this would work then?

[kivik]

The easiest thing to do is probably creating a specific image for the portraits, and use text interpolation:

Code: Select all

define config.side_image_tag = "portrait"
image portrait = "portraits/[portrait_image].png"
default portrait_image = "player"

...

$ portrait_image = "eileen"

[ArizaLuca]

Ah... that's helpful, but I'm not entirely sure I understand how that's supposed to work? Can you please explain a little further? (I'm so sorry about bugging you by the way; thank you so much for dealing with my being a total newb xD)

[kivik]

No problems.

So if I understand correctly (I haven't tried it myself), the config variable takes an image tag name, and will always display that image tag as side image for dialogues. So in my code, I've put in "portrait" so it should always use my portrait image. In practice you should be able create a series of images like portrait happy, portrait sad etc. but it doesn't make sense in this case.

So our image portrait is "portraits/[portrait_image].png" - well I'd suggest you put all these specific portraits in the same folder if you have dedicated portraits. Then portraits/player.png is the player portrait, portraits/eileen.png is the eileen portrait. You just need to have the ones that you want.

Alternatively if you want to use normal character portraits, you can do that too, so long as you can create an image path convention that you can substitute the portrait name - e.g. player, eileen, martha, etc.

The [portrait_image] part of the string gets interpolated by the Renpy engine when it displays the image, it knows that anything between [] brackets are variables, so it looks for the portrait_image variable and put whatever is in it as part of the image filename. So:

if portrait_image == "player" then image portrait = "portraits/player.png"
if portrait_image == "eileen" then image portrait = "portraits/eileen.png"

You just need to change the portrait_image variable, and it'll change the portrait image for you. So in the example above, portrait_image starts off with "player" so the game will always display portraits/player.png to start with, until it hits the line $ portrait_image = "eileen", then it'll start displaying portraits/eileen.png instead.


Hope I've explained that ok, if not, point out what bit doesn't and I'll try another way.

[ArizaLuca]

Ahhh, thank you so much. This really helped!