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March 28, 2024, 05:24:00 pm

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Use of ePSXe before 2.0 is highly discouraged. Mednafen, RetroArch, and Duckstation are recommended for playing/testing, pSX is recommended for debugging.


A Concept-Driven Approach to Lore

Started by lirmont, February 06, 2014, 03:55:27 am

lirmont

February 06, 2014, 03:55:27 am Last Edit: February 06, 2014, 05:28:38 pm by lirmont
Concept-Driven Lore Quick Look



Please use the larger player to view the video in its intended detail (480p). So, here's a demonstration of how Tethical can help you integrate a backstory (and other art) into something that's a more interactive experience for an end-user. On the backend, the engine reads in a formatted list of sections and entries. Those things have concepts associated with them, and the engine takes care of putting all of that together, meaning you don't have to manually indicate where some phrase should be highlighted. You would just use the phrase in the story, and the engine knows to highlight it (or prepare to highlight it). This feature will be used to help curate the demo (explaining some of the history around this project).

Cheetah

I'm liking this idea. I think I get it from the developers perspective, in terms of just being able to quickly refer to various information for continuity. For gameplay, is it kind of how old school RPGs would bold or highlight a new or special term? Then could you use this system to in addition make those items clickable to popup a quick info screen on that concept? This would be pretty awesome, particularly in complex stories like FFT or most RPGs for that matter.
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lirmont

Initially, that's what I wanted to do. The underlying engine (Panda3d) doesn't make that easy, though. I mean, it can change complex font styles very well, but actually picking text with a mouse requires real geometry, which means having to overlay geometry on top of characters (or, more generally, words). Getting geometry that matches size and shape isn't a big deal, but lining it up requires basically the same code to layout the text in the first place (which is not ideal). I still plan on tackling that. I also want to put an image into the larger text, though I don't really have a good idea for how to intuitively couple those with huge (or short) walls of text.