Plugins + Scripts BubbleControl

BubbleControl is a person plugin, which can be used to tweak the behavior of the VAM's built-in Speech and Thought bubbles.

Current version supports the following tweaks:

• Resize the bubbles.
• Automatically compensate for Person Atom scale. VAM's bubbles scale with Person's scale by default, making them really hard to read for smaller characters. This option gets rid of that.
• Restrict bubble sizes to prevent them from getting too small and unreadable when far away. Or too huge when close.
• Restrict bubble positions so they always appear on-screen, on its edge closest towards the speaking/thinking person.
• Change the font (to one of the built-in VAM fonts), its style and size.
• Change the bubble's or text's color and alpha.
• Fade-in/scale-in bubbles when they appear, and fade-out/scale-out them when they disappear.

All these features work fine in VR. The default position restriction in VR is configured so that the bubbles stay in your peripheral vision. Unlike on desktop they are not really readable, but you will know where to turn your head to read them. You can change the settings to move them more in front even in VR, but it can be quite distracting.

Just by adding the plugin to a person, some of the settings are enabled by default:

• Person Atom scale compensation is enabled. Bubble sizes will match Person Scale 1.0, no matter how scaled the actual person is.
• Distance scaling limits are enabled. The bubble won't scale up when closer than 0.5m, and won't scale down when farther away than 3m.
• Position restriction is on, both on desktop and VR.
• Fade out is configured to 1s, fade in and scale in/out are disabled. This matches the default VAM's bubble behavior.

Of course you can change these defaults in the plugin's settings, or through triggers. For the position restriction feature, you can choose the approximate space left between the bubble and the screen edge, and setting it to a small negative value will make the bubbles partially leave the screen - they won't be readable then, but the player will know that someone is talking/thinking and where to turn to view them, which might work better for your scene.


Check the following video for a short demonstration of the features.



Version 2 adds the ability to use one of the VAM's built-in fonts, which allows non-latin characters to be finally used in bubbles.


Version 3 adds bubble transparency, and fade/scale appear/disappear effects.