VAMStory
Hi, @hazmhox I must say that I really like your plugin. I have a menu now, with sub menus, everything. I still have a minor nice-to-have feature to request: could you add in Vam Story -> Global Options -> UI Alignment also "CENTER" as an option (next to Left and Right)? I am displaying text in front of the character, and I'd like the text to always show on the center of the character if possible...

And maybe have a global option where you can set the width of the vamstory window? Right now lines are being broken into new lines, but I'd like to have a bigger window so that it doesn't happen. With the VAMActions plugin you could set the UI width, but in VAM Story I can't find this option.
Ok I found how to solve this, by decreasing the font size, and increasing the UI Size :).

Hey pinosante!
Can you screenshot your case for the "UI center" thing ?
I don't see an instance where it would be nice to have the text centered, especially for dialog, for me for a good readability, it's either left or right... or potentially justified... but center is often reserved to titles / narration texts.
 
UI bug:
If this wasn't spotted before and if it's possible to fix even, on Actions when you have a Toggle in one action and the next action is a Toggle button, the "Off triggers" buttons go on top of the "Label Off" area.

Ok got it, that was a sneaky state, pushing an update soon : )
Thank you as usual @atani !
 
hazmhox updated VAMStory with a new update entry:

Bug Fixes & QoL

VAMStory
  • Added Close when clicking last dialog option in the Global Options which will close the UI when clicking the last dialog of a group
  • Fixed a bug where Edit displayed wasn't working after renaming groups

VAMStoryActions
  • Fixed a bug where changing to/deleting another "toggle" action could break the UI alignment (thanks atani!)

Read the rest of this update entry...
 
Outstanding plugin! Though I'd expect nothing less from you. Always a treat working with your plugins. ?

A couple thoughts:

In Story Actions, I would like to see the buttons have the ability to hide other buttons. (Trigger action) I've made a somewhat elaborate story setup and sometimes, when a button starts an animation, It's no longer needed and if it's clicked again, it will break things. Just some additional control over individual buttons would be cool. You could create a pretty complex menu/choice system.

Not even sure if this would be possible, but button positions? More control over the appearance of the actions. Ex: Two buttons on top, slider middle, two buttons under and a single exit button under that. Now that I said it out loud..... Yeah, I don't want much... :unsure:

Once again, LOVE this plugin. I've been having a blast with it. Gotta dig in and figure Director out. I'm still using timeline to stage and time things out.
 
Thanks for you feedback @ubdreamin

1 - I'm thinking about a state system per action for both VAMS and VAMSA. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the best possible solution without adding too much clutter in the UI.

2 - This is extremely complex the way you say it... like a super UI customizer (or pretty much, the UI creator of Unity). This is not gonna happen because I want the plugin to stay simple and fast to use. This is why the "stealing" system for VAMStory exists.

BUT... I have a similar thing in mind for actions, because I knew the day would come where somebody would ask that.
I don't know if I can include that easily in actions... so I kinda have an "action grouper" thing in mind where it would simply steal all actions you want and combine them all into one single entity automatically.

This would give you complete freedom on your alignment, sizes, appearance for each panel you're adding to the grouper.
I think that's the best way to keep each plugin "simple", but still have a huge customization ability if you combine them all.
 
Simple is good. One of the plugins best features. If it were to turn into one of those monstrous and confusing state machine plugins, I'd lose some love for it. I can only see this one getting better and better.
 
Hey pinosante!
Can you screenshot your case for the "UI center" thing ?
I don't see an instance where it would be nice to have the text centered, especially for dialog, for me for a good readability, it's either left or right... or potentially justified... but center is often reserved to titles / narration texts.
Here is an example!
 
Here is an example!

Ummhhh... talking about readability :p

I think you're slightly distorting the purpose of VAMStory here. You're using it as more of a subtitle thing than a dialog system.
For now I'm not super at ease with giving the ability to center the text since it could induce bad habits for readability just like this example.

For instance, your text over her is already extremely hard to read in this video (because no background + color choice), having it centered would even make it worse.

You might find my stance a bit "harsh", but I'm kind of hoping to induce good practices with my plugins :]
 
Here is another video with better readability, the last one was a quick video just to show you where I thought centering would be nice.
 
Here is another video with better readability, the last one was a quick video just to show you where I thought centering would be nice.

Yup that's more like it!
I think you could compensate by reducing the size of the UI to make the text more packed.

That said, with a proper setup like this, I don't see the pros of centering the text. I've worked a long time on UX/Frontend/UI Design, and centering the text here would make it even more awkward than having short text aligned on the left or on the right.

It's a tendency people have to center everything... I don't know what's with that but this is not always the right move : D
For instance, I often see huge releases on the hub with all the text center, I'm simply skipping, it's really uncomfortable to read.

In this case, I find it pretty well balanced. I don't see anything wrong!
And I'm not saying that because I don't want to add centering :p
 
I apologize for the possible offtopic, but tell me the ways to lock the review in the scene of a relatively empty atom containing VAMStory. I would like the player's camera to be anchored to an empty atom (which I will move using TimeLine).
 
I apologize for the possible offtopic, but tell me the ways to lock the review in the scene of a relatively empty atom containing VAMStory. I would like the player's camera to be anchored to an empty atom (which I will move using TimeLine).

Whaaaaaaat ='D
lock the review ? "relatively empty" ?

Let me try: you want the empty atom containing VAMStory, to be locked to another empty atom used as an "Embody" for a cam ride ? right ?
 
Whaaaaaaat ='D
lock the review ? "relatively empty" ?

Let me try: you want the empty atom containing VAMStory, to be locked to another empty atom used as an "Embody" for a cam ride ? right ?
sorry, my English is bad.. I have seen scenes in which you cannot turn the camera in Play Mode, that is, the ability to look around is blocked, the player shows only what is needed. I would also like to make the player look only at an empty atom with the VaMstory plugin. In this case, all the dialogues will be in the right place, and the player will see only the part of the scene that he should.

I haven't tried using "Embody". I was referring to the desktop mode
 
Embody is the perfect system to control the camera either in VR or Desktop.
You can lock an empty to the camera (which would contain VAMStory), ensure to leave VAMStory "static" (not following the camera) and lock it to the cam'
I haven't really experimented with that 'coz I find it laggy, but you could ask on the discord, I know some people did that with vanilla vam features : )
 
hazmhox updated VAMStory with a new update entry:

QoL

VAMStoryActions
  • Added UI starts hidden option in Global Options to hide a panel automatically when the scene loads
  • Added Show Actions UI trigger to display the UI like in VAMStory
  • Added Hide Actions UI trigger to hide the UI like in VAMStory
  • Added Play Sound trigger to play sounds from VAMStory library. The sound is played like in all plugins of VAMStory "2D" (stereo) and respect the click volume slider.

Read the rest of this update entry...
 
@hazmhox Uhm, I can't seem to find how to play sounds from the VAMStory Library? I can't find the option in VAMStory nor VAMDirector?
 
Nope! It's VAMStoryActions only at the moment @pinosante , this is why I'm "prefixing" the bullet points change list with the name of the "sub-plugin".
I can add them in VAMStory if you want ( Director does not load datas at all ).
 
hazmhox updated VAMStory with a new update entry:

Optimization and fixes

General
  • Optimized the whole VAMStory Suite so that all the plugins initialize themselves only when all instances of VAMS plugins in a scene are ready.

    This is mostly due to the fact that heavy scenes could prevent start triggers in Director or Story to behave properly (Director firing Story before it is ready for instance).

VAMStory
  • Added Play Sound trigger to play sounds from VAMStory library. The sound...

Read the rest of this update entry...
 
AnimationPoser does all of this. Vam developers keep working on 300 plugins when there is one needing developers and that already does all of this in a simpler way.
 
AnimationPoser does all of this. Vam developers keep working on 300 plugins when there is one needing developers and that already does all of this in a simpler way.

I beg your pardon? What are you talking about?
 
hazmhox updated VAMStory with a new update entry:

"VAMStory Suite" synchronization warning

To all creators using VAMStory
A warning about the new synchronization system.

I can't thank enough @PetaZwega to shine some light on that.

VAMStory since 1.17 waits for all plugins of the "suite" to be ready before initializing themselves. Due to the way Unity works... realtime updates (Update function) and coroutines cannot work while the atoms are in a off state.

Which result in any other active (in on state) plugin of VAMStory waiting...

Read the rest of this update entry...
 
Does this mean we also can't make the actions/story atoms part of an off subscene? That would be an annoying limitation :(
 
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Does this mean we also can't make the actions/story atoms part of an off subscene? That would be an annoying limitation :(
That's something I was doing. No, it will cause issues.
You might need to rethink some subscene parts to keep VAMStory atoms ON, using UI disabled to only show when needed.
 
Yup @thiciathy , as @atani says... off is off.
When an atom (or a gameobject as in Unity) is off, the whole tree (children) are also off.

First, I haven't tested subscenes, and I don't plan on really digging into that... because I always had issues with subscenes even with pure basic atoms from VaM.
Most of the powerful tools made by the community do not need subscenes anyway. And pretty much any well authored scene can work without using a single subscene.

And more on the side of authoring the scenes: I've experimented enough to know that it's better to have everything on at start... using for instance Overlays to mask the screen at the beginning of the scene. THEN, hide everything you don't need. It is a good way to ensure everything is preloaded and cached before playthrough.

It's just a proper reason to adjust your workflow ;)
 
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