NPC interaction

I am trying to get some info on how to make a single player Level using HL2. I am hopeing that someone could point me to a site or a tutorial that could direct me on how the NPC's react and talk to gordon. I need to make my own conversations and I am looking for a starting point. Any help would be great. Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,

Jp

Wow, you're ambitious. What you're trying to do is quite challenging. Have you tried using the Face Poser yet?

I haven't attempted anything that complicated to this date, but this thread might be somewhat relevant to you: http://www.snarkpit.com/forums.php?forum=6&topic=4174&8

I have been able to use Face Poster to create the speaking parts and the lip sync stuff. Well now what I though would be simple is driving me crazy. How do you get someone to react to Gordon. I can't firgure out how to make an NPC walk up to Gordon since info_player start can't be named. I named the suit but it is a fixed point and the NPC's will just walk to the point the suit was spawned. I would like to figure out how to get a friendly NPC to follow me around. Any Ideas?

I thought the friendly NPC's follow you around by default, unless you flagged "not commandable" in the properties.

Other than that, I am not sure how to accomplish what you're trying to do.

I might be able to help if I know more about what exactly you're trying to accomplish. Do you just want the NPC to walk up to Gordon and start talking? Walk up and start talking at the same time? I assume there are animations involved, if not your NPC will look a little lifeless, so when do you want to start those?

The simplest tip I can offerwithout more info is to check out the "flags" tab of your NPC's properties. It's often forgotten, but its full of useful features, especially for NPCS. Specifically you can force your NPC to follow Gordon, which in your case might be quite useful.

Now, if you just want your npc to walk up to gordon, and then address him or whatever, place an info_target entity where you want the npc to walk to, then reference that target (by its name) in the script you've created in face poser. That's how I THINK it works at least, hopefully things work out for you.

So, your basic setup should (if I understand your situation right) be something like the following:

Create a scenefile with faceposer. Your most basic file will probably consist of a moveTo, with your info_target as the "Move To Actor" target followed by a playing of the lip-synching/voice stuff (Grats on figuring that stuff out, btw, I've been kind of half playing with it and not gotten very far.. if you have the time I'd love a tutorial :smile: ). Now, place the scene in the map with a choreo_scene. I don't know if they work without triggers to start them, but you could experiment.

That should get you started, if that's not what you need, post again, and I'll do my best to help ya.

Thanks for the advice. I will check out the flags (your right I hardly ever use them). You gave me a good run down of what I was looking for. I am actually dooing a small presentation on face poster to a gamming class on thursday so I should have a small into tutroial sometime this week. I will try to make it web accesable.

Quick and Dirty Guide for Face Poster

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1.) To get started Open Source SDK.

2.) Open the Face Poster Program (Double Click the Word ?Face Poster?)

3.) Once Face Poster is open I usually go to the Window option in the Menu Bar and

choose tile vertical.

4.) Go to File on the Menu Bar and choose the Load Model option (try Alyx, Barney,

Breen, Eli, Gman, Monk, or anything that looks human)

5.) Now Go to the Choreography Menu Option and select New

6.) A window will pop up, all you need to do is give it a name ?Jp_Scene? as an

example now click OK or push ENTER.

7.) Now you should be looking at the Choreography Window let?s say you named your

Choreography Scene ?Start?. You would see ?Start? in the Choreography Window

you need to Right Click on the ?Start? name a selection window will open and choose

the ?New? then ?Channel?

8.) Another window will open and You will also need to name the channel so lets name it

?Channel? and the Add actor Option box should already have ?Jp_Scene? in it. And

click OK.



9.) Right Click on the text where you see ?Jp_Scene? and ?Channel? Choose the WAV

file then Give the WAV file a name. Select the WAV file from a dropdown list and

then click ?OK? The wav file should show up in the Choreography Scene window.

10.) You can move the new sound file around and insert other thins such as Expressions

or Sequences. Name them then select which one you want and it will show up in the

Choreography Window and you can place it within the Timeline where ever you

Want.

11.) Right click on the Channel and select ?Flex Animation?, give it a name and click

Ok. A Flex Animation will open up. If not look for the toolbar along the lower left

Part of your screen and double click the Flex Animation tab.

12.) In the Flex Animation Window Right click and select ?Expand all Tracks? There is a

green time bar near the top of the Flex Animation window You can drag this to

where you want your key frame to go the more key frams you add the smoother it

looks.

(Note: if you place the Green time bar outside the timeline for your Flex animation

Event then it will have only one Key Frame placed in the middle of the Flex

Animation event which works great for small expressions).

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The Largest Obstacle to overcome is just getting use to the editors. Once you are happy with your file then save it ( you can just try and close Face Poster and it will ask if you want to save the file). Now to add the scene to a map look at

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