Hi!
I am fairly new to the forums and Unreal 4, and just started teaching myself blueprints a couple of months ago.
I am currently working on a framework for a dialogue system similar to what you would find in the JRPGs during the PS1 era (Move into the proximity of a NPC or object, press a button, to interact, dialogue appears over the NPC or Object and types out each character, etc). For now the dialogue comes from just an array inside the blueprint but eventually I will probably just have it pull from a CSV/excel file.
Next I would like to set up an easy way to fire off animation assets when specific dialogue lines are being executed.
Example:
I am interacting with a Bartender and on his 3rd line of dialogue I want him to stop and scratch his head before he continues onto his 4th line.
This is where I have run into a road block where I don’t really know what the best practice would be. I could manually edit the blueprints of my NPCs to look for specific lines and then fire off specific animation assets, but that sounds like it could get really messy and would require anyone besides myself using this system to understand how to edit the blueprint.
In a perfect world I would love to have menu for each NPC or Dialogue Object that displays each line of dialogue it will play and have a button beside each line which I you could click to add an animation, and then pick from a drop down menu of the available animation assets to fire off, and maybe have a few parameters I could edit to adjust the timing.
Any thoughts on how I might approach this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time 