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Did you notice that unlike most other RPG games, in Sakura Taisen, the
movement of the lips of the characters actually matches their speech
(whether with voice or not)? This adds a whole lot of realism that
the casual gamer may not even notice consciously (but will enjoy
unconsciously nevertheless ^_^).
Basically a typical character posture (like the one below) can have
4 different eyelid positions (to simulate blinking) and 6 different
lips positions (to simulate the mouth positions for different syllables).
By synchronizing the lips position with the corresponding syllable in
a speech, and by randomly (?) generating a blinking eye sequence every once
in a while, it makes the gamer feel like he/she is actually seeing an
animated character delivering the speech in real time.
Below is a demonstration of the 24 different
combinations for the eyelid and lips positions. To see a particular
combination, simply pass your mouse pointer over a numeral in the
control panel (no need to click on it). The six blocks each represents
a state of the lips, while the 4 numbers inside each block represent
the 4 eyelid positions in a blinking sequence.
Since the placement of the
control buttons aren't really optimized, it's rather difficult to
generate any realistic motion sequence, but it's fun enough to just randomly
point at the different buttons and marvel at Sakura's changing
facial expression. So be creative! ^_^
[If you want more of this, check out the Sakura Taisen Digital Data CDROM for Mac and Win95!]
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