Residual Mood & Demeanors¶
A character spends far more of its time on screen not speaking than speaking. Between its own lines, and while somebody else talks, its face still has to be someone. FaceCue fills that time in two ways.
The residual mood is what the last line leaves behind. A demeanor is who the character is while it waits. Both sit underneath the emotions you author, and both give way when one of those plays.
Residual Mood¶
People do not reset between sentences. Someone who has just said something angry stays a little angry after the last word, and it fades as the moment passes. A character whose face snapped back to blank the instant each line ended would read as switching off between lines.
The residual mood is FaceCue's version of that lingering. When a spoken line ends, a faint trace of how it ended stays on the face, and it lasts until something moves the character on.
What Leaves One¶
A spoken line. Every line the character speaks with emotions on it leaves a residual mood, with nothing to set up. It makes no difference whether those emotions came from tags or were placed in the Cue Clip Composer.
An emotion played from code, when you ask. An emotion played from your own code leaves none unless the call or its handle asks for one, since a moment in the game is not usually a mood the character carries on with. See Playing One Emotion and The Handle.
A Timeline emotion clip, when you ask. Turn on Leave Residual Mood on the clip and it leaves one the way a line does, whether it plays one emotion or a cue file. Left off, the clip's emotion ends with the clip. A clip the playhead leaves before its end, or whose Timeline stops partway through it, follows the character's setting for an interrupted Timeline clip: one that clears the emotion leaves no mood.
How It Plays¶
It is built from the line's last emotion, the last one the line actually reached, as a faint version of how strongly the line played it.
It settles in as the line ends, rising as the line's emotion falls away, so the face goes straight from the line to the mood with no blank beat between them.
It is not frozen. Every few seconds it drifts a little in strength, and now and then it turns for a while to another emotion from the same line before settling back. So a line that moved from Worried to Happy can still show a flicker of the worry afterwards.
It clears when the character speaks again, fading away as the next line begins and that line's own emotions take over. A Timeline emotion clip starting clears it the same way, and so does an emotion played from your own code, unless the call asks to leave the mood standing.
It never doubles up. An emotion from your own code that leaves the mood standing shows at its full strength, and the mood adds only a faint touch underneath. If it is the same emotion, the character feels it once, not twice.
If nobody speaks for a while, it lets go on its own, and the character settles into its idle demeanor.
Its Settings¶
The residual mood is set in the Residual Mood section of the Emotion driver.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable Residual Mood | Turns it on or off for this character. Off, nothing lingers once a line ends. |
| Silence Timeout | Lets the mood fade by itself after a quiet spell, so the idle demeanor can take over. Off, it holds until the character next speaks. |
| Hold Duration | How long that quiet spell is, in seconds. |
Clearing It with Neutral¶
Neutral is the one emotion that puts nothing on the face, and this is its job: as the last emotion on a line, it means the line leaves no mood behind, whatever came before it on that line. Tag the end of a line Neutral when the character should walk away from it untouched.
Anywhere other than the end of a line, Neutral changes nothing about what is already playing, the same as authoring no emotion there at all.
On a Timeline, a clip leaves a mood only when you turn Leave Residual Mood on, so there is nothing for Neutral to clear, and a clip's emotion list does not offer it. A clip already set to Neutral still reads Neutral and plays nothing. In a cue file played by a clip, a Neutral cue that is the last one the clip reaches works as it does at the end of a line.
Demeanors¶
A demeanor is who the character is while it waits: a palette of emotions it drifts through, so a nervous character reads as nervous before they say anything, and an attentive one looks attentive while somebody else talks.
Demeanor Palettes¶
A palette is a short list of emotions from the library, each with an intensity and a weight. The character picks one, plays it for a while as a whole emotion, and moves to another, with the weights deciding which come up most. The cycle length, and how the palette fades in and out when it starts and stops, are its own settings, so a palette can be a slow drift or a lively one.
Each palette also has a Repeat Blend of its own, for when it draws the same emotion twice in a row. It starts on Requested Max, so the emotion carries straight across instead of dipping between the two. Overlapping Emotions sets out the choices.
A demeanor steps aside for the character's own lines. A listening or awaiting demeanor pauses while the character speaks and picks up again with a fresh emotion once the line ends. The idle one fades out the moment anything else takes the face.
The Three Palettes¶
There are three, in two places, because they answer different states of the same conversation:
| Palette | Plays while | Set on |
|---|---|---|
| Idle Demeanor Palette | Nothing else is driving the face | The Emotion driver, behind Enable Idle Demeanor |
| Listening Demeanor Palette | Somebody else is speaking to the character | The listener side of the character |
| Awaiting Response Demeanor Palette | The character is waiting for the player to pick a dialogue choice | The listener side of the character |
The listener side carries one more thing that is not a palette. Nodding is the small nods a listener gives while someone else talks, which is the same idea in a different place: the demeanor is what a listening face does, the nods are what its head does. See Listening Gestures.
The idle palette is the calm one, slower to cycle and quieter, because it plays underneath everything else. The two listening palettes are livelier, and they are the reason a character being spoken to reads as a person paying attention rather than a face on hold. Each ships with a sensible set: the listening one leans on focused, curious and sympathetic, the awaiting one on anticipation. All three are yours to edit, entry by entry, against the names the library knows. Which state the character is in comes from the conversation, which is set out in Speaking & Listening.
Meeting the Residual Mood¶
The idle demeanor waits for the residual mood to clear before it comes in, which is what Silence Timeout is for.
The two listening palettes can play while a residual mood is still there. Default Blend Mode, on the listener side, says how they meet it: Replace lets the palette take the character on its own, holding the mood back, in how the character feels as well as on its face, until the palette ends. Additive layers it over whatever the last line left behind. A palette can override the choice for itself.