Does moreClothing tell the game when it's done somehow? Could another mod use that as an input to kill itself?
Yes, but you should be talking directly to
@Pim_gd or
sby
about this topic.
ModGuy
has already done the necessary work; the Loader provides all of the functionality needed to fulfill this request. I could
probably kluge something together which works with the current versions of dialogueActions and moreClothing, but the code would be very brittle. You'll get better results if you can convince
sby
and/or
@Pim_gd to officially support this feature in their mods.
It temporarily displays a black splash screen that resides on top of any green mod loading text
Possible misfeature. The text may be bad for immersion, but it's still important information. Modders rely on user-reported errors (i.e. red text) in order to troubleshoot problems. If the screen simply turns black and then something goes wrong, it would be very difficult for us to investigate and resolve the problem.
The total concealment of any "progress indicator" stuff might also confuse newbies. Someone might simply assume that the game has
crashed after watching a black screen for twenty seconds, and so they'd close the Flash Player window. Then they start it up again and the same thing happens. Then they delete the whole thing and downvote your mod :)
and it mutes the sound (so you don't hear THUMP THUMP THUMP as moreClothing is flitting through stuff). It also freezes/disables/hides characters, whatever, makes them inert.
That sounds effective - but a cheaper solution may exist. If you simply load a position file which places the characters several meters apart, then movement could probably be allowed because it's mostly harmless (and won't generate any SFX).
Then when moreClothing is all done loading, it bows out and tells dialogue actions to play any start lines.
Another possible approach would be to "pause" the dialogue engine while
g.sceneLayer.visible is false. Then you wouldn't need to directly integrate moreClothing with dialogueActions. moreClothing would simply manipulate the scene visibility (which is something that it
already does, in order to accelerate its loading) and then dialogueActions would "notice" when moreClothing is finished. It would then proceed with the Start lines.
Actually ... you
might be able to achieve this
without any changes to mods, simply by including some fancy conditional logic within your dialogue lines (i.e. deliberately lock your starting lines into a loop based on the value of
g.sceneLayer.visible ... then escape the loop when the scene becomes visible ... then load an appopriate position, background image, costumes, etc ... then launch into the actual narrative). I've never done any serious dialogue scripting; you'd need to talk to
@DrZombi or
@Pim_gd or someone else who really
knows this stuff.
