Including character portraits

Hi. I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to include character portraits in the window that displays the character's dialogue. I was thinking something along the lines of what they did for Chrono Cross.

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Originally posted by Pedrith:
**Hi. I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to include character portraits in the window that displays the character's dialogue. I was thinking something along the lines of what they did for Chrono Cross.

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better yet portrait animation's(grandia) which would be the same as chrono cross's lil emotion meter, remember the one with the jewel.

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You could use the "picture with dialog text" functionality to accomplish this. This feature is very buggy in the currently released version of Coldstone, but it will work just fine when Coldstone 1.0.1 is released to the public. I've been wanting this functionality too, so I've been thinking about this a fair bit. Here's how I would do dialog portraits in Coldstone 1.0.1:

-Create your dialog graphic. Cut off the top of it (where the portrait will go) by a straight horizontal cut and save the severed piece as a separate file, which will serve as a template for each dialog pict.
-Use the remainder of the graphic to create your basic dialog layout.
-For each portrait, load up the template image and add in whatever character-specific graphics are needed (portrait and name, at least), and save it to the appropriate folder (/Events/Pics)
-When you make a dialog call, have it include the appropriate portrait file. In-game, the bottom of the portrait image and the top of the dialog layout will line up seamlessly, creating the illusion of a character portrait on top of the dialog box.

Once again, this does not work in the current Coldstone, but will as soon as the update is released.

You could perhaps do animations with a dialog movie instead of a pic, but I haven't tried.

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