Let's talk about talking news - Outcast: Legacy of the Yods

Crysis Wars has a feature rich Dialogue System including support for all kinds of facial expressions and generating lipsync pretty much automatically. The trouble starts though as soon as you try to make dialogues non-linear: the integrated system only allows Dialogues which run straight from top to bottom.

Since interactive dialogues will play an important part in open Outcast we had to find a better solution. Together with our Game Designers we set up following feature list for our own implementation:

• Dialogue flow is nonlinear (influenced by chosen options and logic / Lua scripts)
• Dialogues are defined in XML files
• Translation support
• Different camera modes that are configured over a config file
• Triggering actions that can be defined using the Flow Graph System of Crysis
• Starting sequences and optionally resuming the Dialogue again after they finished
• Support for Lipsync and facial expressions
• Providing simple Flow Nodes so Leveldesigners can integrate Dialogues easily
• Skipping lines of the dialogue

Now all of these features have been implemented, see for yourself:

If you are interested in the technical details or ask yourself how your mod could benefit from our system, read along in the corresponding feature.

Successfully adding a modification of this magnitude to Crysis Wars confirmed us that we chose the right platform for our project.

A Highlight of the system are the camera modes you can see in the Camera Test Video.

The next challenge is the extension of the Quest system and support for persistence - you heard right - that would enable travelling between different regions (levels) freely without losing quest progress!

More on this to come after we implemented it.