[IDEA]Auto-accent system

[Exsharaen]

I know this is quite a hard system to implement, so I must stress again that this is only an idea.

In Chrono Cross, all 45 characters has their own accent. By defeating the game in some mean, I discovered that all accents are not hard-written, but hard-coded by what SquareSoft called auto-accent system. So, let's say...
(sorry if some accents is incorrect or weird, I don't speak English)

Normal Accent: You have stolen the key, haven't you?
Pirate Accent: You 'ave stole the key, 'ave you not?
Funky Accent: You stole da bloody key, yes?
French Accent: You stolen the key, non?
And so on...

Furthermore, the same phrase will be spoken differently if we reach that conversation with different active actor.

I think it will enrich our games; characterization is made consistent by using auto-accent system. Saving times too as opposed to using events (maybe).

So, what do you think? (Don't say it's doable by EVENTS; everybody knows that)

 

[Rhazdel]

It's not a matter of "if it can be done", but I think "should it be done".

In your example, you change not only the words, but the sentence structure, as well. Whoever wrote the code would have to come up with, and script, generalized conversions that completely re-write every sentence based on a pre-determined set of rules. That would not only be massive amounts of code, but it would be hard to implement, because the English language is so diverse.

For example:

Let's look at a normal sentence, and then your Pirate example.

Normal Accent: "Haven't you stolen the key?"
Pirate Accent: "You 'ave stole the key, 'ave you not?"

You rearranged the sentence structure. This would be ok to script, by essentially defining the parts of the sentence and reordering them, and scripting the conversion of "H" to "'" (apostrophe).

But, what about this sentence?

Normal Accent: "Hadn't you best be leaving?"
Pirate Accent: "'Adn't you best be leavin'?"

No reorder of the sentence structure, even though the sentences are similar.

Reorder the sentence based on the previous set of rules and you would get this:

"You best be leavin', 'ave you not?"

Doesn't work well. While you could script around this, the fact that you would have to call the script in every event, anyway, means you would still need to do a lot of work in the events.

I don't know how much time a script would save you.

What might be best is to script your speech in all your events for every person (accent) and "Label" them all.
Then, make and call a Common Event that checks the party leader and "Jumps to Label" to go to the right line of speech.

I could be wrong, though.

 

[Exsharaen]

Well, it's an idea...

But now you give me an idea on how the script may work. Instead of auto-rearranging the sentence, which might be very difficult, the script should describe all accents (which are manually input, either within Script Editor or in separate text files). Then, I can just simply call one of them using Message Show command, describing some flag (something like \acc), which will search through all accent, pick the appropriate one, and display it.

As I know, making a common event, esp a long one (you must be aware on how long the common event will be for 45 accents) is slower than running a script. By using event, the game must interpret all commands into scripts, then run the script. Double work, which is unnecessary if using script. Don't know if I'm right...