Chattering NPCs

Jon Alma · 2006-05-03T06:32:49

For a while now I've been developing a first person RPG and have now reached a point where I am trying to add a bit of life to the previously dummy like NPCs. A fully functional player to NPC dialogue system is in place, but I would also like to have the NPCs 'chattering' amongst themselves. At its simplest this would be just one NPC 'speaking' one line of text, but at a more complex level I'm thinking of each time an NPC speaks it sends out a message to nearby NPCs seeing if they want to respond so you might end up with a little conversation along the lines of, NPC1: Can I interest you in a real bargain? NPC2: At that price you must be joking! Nothing too difficult there (or at least not if I keep things simple and try not to have conversations any more complex than that). The problem comes from the fact that the NPCs do not have voices - I'm using subtitles as recording speech is not a possibility for the moment at least. Currently the subtitles appear at the base of the screen and with the first person view there is no real indication of who said what. I thought of including speech bubbles billboards above the NPCs or have the NPCs speak a generic gibberish phrase (very Sims-like) so the player gets an idea of where the text is coming from, but this would probably look or sound out of place in the game. I'm working on a talking animation for the NPCs (gesturing arms, etc), but this is not always going to be appropriate (switching from an attacking animation to the polite talk animation to say "I'm going to kill you!" and then switching back?) and for the moment the best general solution I can think of is to include the name of the NPC in the subtitle (as in the example above). Any better ideas?