Eek! Games Forum

In the story I'm designing, when the player first meets a character there is an introductory dialog, which is fairly long (not huge, but longer than most dialogs). When the dialog is triggered, I have the character emote happy on dialog start.

In game, the characters tend to emote angrily instead while the dialog is being displayed. I've noticed it seems like HP somehow tries to infer the tone of the dialog, and I guess since it is so long and has a lot of exclamation points, it is being inferred as an angry dialog when it should actually be happy and excited.

I was able to get around this by setting the character's unable to animate conversations state, but then they just have a neutral expression, they don't play the happy emote I specified.

Any way around this, and what criteria is the game using to determine the tone of the dialogs, or does the game not do that at all and I'm somehow otherwise encouraging the angry emote?

There are Personality, Relationship, and Mood factors that tie into dialogue emotion behavior (in terms of the default behaviors). Your !!! won't hurt, promise

What are the social relationships between the Speaking NPC and the Player? What is their mood at this time? Personality settings? This is in 0.18.2?

Mood is always set to a random value from 1-10 at start (never negative)
Friendship and romance start at 0, with a random kicker that will add or subtract 1 or 2 points.
All personality traits are randomized anywhere from -100 to +100, with a few caveats depending on the character.

This is in 0.16.5 btw (sucker for Vickie's old outfit).

I've done this exact same way of randomizing the characters at start in a previous story I designed, and never seemed to have that problem. The only difference is the text of the starting dialog.

Ooph I don't recall how that worked in 0.16.5 compared to 0.19.x. But I do know we never looked through the dialogue strings for specific characters or anything you could "type in" to determine emotive behavior. It was always based on the things I described. Worst case, you might be dealing with a bug.

You should not get any angry behavior if mood is positive, friendship is > 0 between two Characters, etc. Try isolating one NPC away from others. There are/were additional "personality compatibility" behaviors in place that could dynamically affect NPC relationships in ways that could affect emotes, outside of any scripted content.