World Inputs¶
What your game tells a character about the world it is in. The four things FaceCue cannot work out for itself, and where each one is documented.
This is the integration surface. Everything else in FaceCue works without you writing a line of code, and this is where your game gets to have an opinion.
The Four Lanes¶
Each is independent, and each has a page setting out its own interface, its methods and its event.
| Lane | What it tells the character | Carries |
|---|---|---|
| Look Target | What to look at | One target |
| Dialogue State | Whether it is being spoken to, and whether it owes an answer | Two values |
| Strain | How hard it is working | Two independent axes |
| Light | How bright the scene is | One reading |
Every one of them is optional. A character with none of them set still behaves: it resolves its own speech mode from its audio, keeps its pupils at rest, and looks wherever it was last told to.
Two Ways In¶
Before the individual lanes, one idea runs through all of them, and it is worth reading first: each lane takes a source you implement and an override you set, and the override masks the source while it is present.
That, and what ownership means, is set out in Sources and Overrides.
Start From the Examples¶
You do not have to write a source from nothing. FaceCue ships a worked example for every lane, under its Examples folder: a simple source and a simple setter each for Look Target, Dialogue State and Strain, and three for Light, one you author by hand and two that sense the scene, by modelling the lights around the character or by rendering what its eyes see.
Their controls are deliberately plain. Each one shows the whole shape of a source, what it has to answer and how it hands the answer over, without a game attached, so it reads as a starting point for wiring the lane into a system of your own. The same examples are the basis for the integrations with dialogue frameworks on the roadmap.
Where Each One Reaches¶
- Look Target is the input to Gaze. Setting it is how a character looks at anything, and both gaze engines take it the same way.
- Dialogue State feeds the conversant state, which the eyes and breath read across the whole face. See Speaking and Listening.
- Strain reaches Breath on one axis and the lids on the other.
- Light is what the pupils respond to. Without it they still respond to what the character is feeling and thinking, but not to walking into a dark room.
Watching Them Work¶
The brain's inspector carries a live readout for each lane under Behavior: Look Status, Dialogue Status, Strain Status and Light Status, with the resolved Gaze, Mental and Conversant states underneath them.
They are the fastest way to answer the question this chapter exists for. A character behaving oddly is usually in a state you did not expect, and this is where you find out which one.