Emoted talking

"You can tell who is speaking without reading a word of it. That is the whole point." — Stage Marshal Ibb Corran
Verified

Your character gestures and moves their mouth while you speak. A room full of people then reads as a conversation rather than a wall of text.

What it does

When you send a line of speech, StoryForce picks a talk animation for you and plays it for as long as the line takes to say. Nobody has to type anything extra. Your character's face also moves while the line is on screen.

The animation it picks depends on what your character is doing. Standing, sitting and leaning each have their own set of gestures. A seated character talks with their hands where they are, rather than standing up to do it.

The 3 contexts

StoryForce works out which of 3 poses fits: sitting first, then standing, then leaning.

Sitting

You get the seated gesture set when you are holding a sit-talk emote. Only /emote sittalk counts. The other seated poses look right but carry no talk animations. Use sittalk for any scene where your character has a conversation from a chair.

Standing

You get the standing set when no emote is active and you are not crouched. That covers any speech outside a pose.

Crouching suppresses it. If you are ducked behind a crate, your character speaks without gesturing.

Leaning

You get the leaning set when you are holding /emote lean. It is the only emote with lean-talk animations attached.

How long it plays

The animation runs for whichever is longer:

  • the full length of the animation the game picked
  • 60 milliseconds for every spoken character in your line, up to a ceiling of 10 seconds

So a short line always finishes its gesture cleanly, and a long speech keeps gesturing rather than snapping back after one wave.

What counts as a spoken character

Only what your character actually says counts. 2 things are stripped out before the length is measured:

  • text you have coloured red with ^1 or cyan with ^5
  • anything wrapped in the emote delimiters, which are || by default

That second one matters. /me wraps your action in those delimiters, so an action does not lengthen the talk animation the way real dialogue does. Whitespace never counts either.

Change the delimiters with Server-side. The pair of characters wrapping an action in chat. Defaults to two vertical bars..

Settings

Both of these are on your own machine and only affect what you send.

Client-side. Set to 1 to stop your character gesturing when you speak. The face still moves. Defaults to 0. Client-side. Set to 1 to stop your character's mouth moving when you speak. Defaults to 0.

Things to note

  • Melee gets no talk animation. Bare fists is a combat-ready stance, so the guard stays up rather than dropping into a relaxed gesture. The face still moves.
  • Crouching suppresses the standing set, including the crouch you get from a crouch toggle.
  • 74 of the 76 emotes suppress it entirely. Only sittalk and lean carry their own talk animations, so holding any other pose means no gesture.
  • Off the ground means no gesture. Speaking mid-jump plays no body animation, though the face still moves.
  • The dead do not gesture or move their face, even though dead characters can still use chat.
  • A line with no spoken characters plays nothing. A pure /me action or a line of only colour codes triggers no animation.
  • The gesture is picked at random from the set for your context, so the same line twice can look different.

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