Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

[Kawa]

Now it makes sense. If you pick "small", the high-res assets, including the Rave portraits, wouldn't fit.

Anyway, we've gone way off track!

[Collector]

Even worse: the Windows portraits weren't views.

I had forgotten.

Anyway, I believe they may have been called Rave portraits, and regardless of the tech name they allowed talkers to be more visually expressive if I recall correctly. More information in the relevant ScummVM code.

No other SCI game used them to my knowledge.

You are remembering correctly, Rave. In fact, a while back deckarep posted a GO script to extract them and as you noted, KQ6 was the only SCI game to use them.

There we go!  I imaging at the time, they considered it an extension of the standard Size ability of windows.

I had never noticed that before. I had made the same assumption as Kawa about the "-" button, being a Windows interface rather than SCI. So being more of a Windows feature than one by Sierra, it was probably a transitional feature between old the old VGA standard of 320x200 and later VESA/SVGA 640x480. Another way to force it in-game was to switch to from speech to text, of course with no voices.

[lskovlun]

Sierra bought the company that produced Rave. I found an article about the Rave system some time ago (which is easier when you have the designer's name), but I can't find it just now. I'd say that Rave tried to do some things that Sierra was already doing with their internal tools (lip-syncing was a major feature), so it was a bit superfluous.

EDIT: Found my own post here that linked the article: https://www.callapple.org/documentation/bright-stars-talking-heads-behind-the-scenes-with-hyperanimator/   Elon Gaspar was the name.

[Kawa]

Now consider: they also bought Coktel Vision, for their animation system. If you look at the leaked SCI32 code you can see that the video player code retains its original French comments, including a whole card at the top with ASCII checkboxes and text fields.

Now consider this was once about Talker portraits only having three parts.

[doomlazer]

As long as we're off topic, Coktel Vison was a cool company. I've read that a lot of their raunchier titles were lead by woman devs, which seems like a smart move.

[Collector]

Muriel Tramis

[amcparty]

I'm glad this question sparked a lot of conversation, haha. Unfortunately for me, I've been struggling to get this to work. I've been running into crashing issues whenever a conversation starts to begin. I'll keep playing around with it, but I'm hoping I don't have to additionally alter every talkie script for each individual character to accommodate the changes I make in Blink.sc. For example, in Cassima.sc there's (super init: 0 0 tMouth140 &rest) which passes 0s when specific parts aren't used. If there's now 4 loops, I'm curious if I need to pass an extra 0 even when they're only using the original 3 loops.

[Kawa]

I've been running into crashing issues whenever a conversation starts to begin

If I were a betting cat, my first guess would be that none of the talkers actually provide a fourth argument and a lack of proper argc checks and/or null reference checks messes up the part where they're actually drawn and cycled.