Feature Suggestions

[MatthewHarmon]

Hey Ben:

ChatMapper is really helping us out on a game project right now. As we get into it more, I'm coming up with a few quick and easy feature suggestions:

Add a Key to Skip Nodes In Simulator
It would be really helpful to have the spacebar (or some other configurable key) skip to the next node in the simulator. We have a LOT of conversations and a LOT of nodes and sometimes we need to scream through them to get to a trouble-spot. It should override both the sound-file duration and the automatic character-count based duration.

Add "Post Audio" Delay Value for Simulator
Since we need to trim our audio files down to their exact size to save memory, the conversations run a little unnaturally in the simulator. Would be good to be able to add a delay after a sound file has played before the next node is visited.

Add Conversation Sound File
It would be cool to have the ability to specify a sound file that would loop during the simulation of a conversation. This could help clients understand the context of the conversation better. Imagine a beachfront conversation with waves splashing and seagulls crowing in the background.

Add Ability To Define Global Lua Functions, etc.
It would be really cool if you could let us load/execute a "project global" lua script. This would let us define functions, etc. that could be run by the simulator. You could specify it in the project global settings. The simulator would probably need to re-load it each time it is run.

Thanks again for a great project. I'll keep the suggestions coming :-)

Matt

[Ben]

Hi Matt,

Thanks so much for the thoughtful suggestions. We will certainly be adding some or all of these to the next release (a couple of weeks away now).

For skipping nodes, does the escape key not do the trick?

-Ben