It would be nice to be able to have characters say things but speech bubbles would be clumsy. You'd have to code them to rotate based on camera position and they would get in the way or be off screen and they wouldn't be able to contain much text.

Proposal: A dialog "window" that can be put up either on the bottom or top of the screen. The window could have a "portrait" on the left side:

|Portrait| One to three lines of text that's optionally interactive. More if you want to add a vertical scroll on the right side.

The portrait would be a square box with the character's face in it and the dialog would be in a rectangular box beside it. It would be maybe half the height of the timeline viewer. When it's put up you would scale the displayed interaction like you do with the timeline viewer. Or not.

The portrait would either be a scaled-down "snapshot" portrait of a character taken earlier (via snapshot handler) OR a live camera (picture in picture) so you would see the character's face in real time while reading their "lines".

You could leave out the portrait if you want to use the entire window for "lines".

You could also use the live portrait camera pointing at other things to tell stories (e.g. have a character narrating their thoughts while eyeing up the other character's attributes).

Stay with me here I can see your eyes are starting to glaze over.

You would cast it to the top of the screen or the bottom depending on your interaction (where it would be least intrusive). You would put it up with a timeline event (or maybe a "Dialog" property that you would change on the timeline).

Optionally you could add lines the user could click on to fire timeline events (e.g. "Back" to return to the previous dialog/step/scene, "Next" to proceed to the next dialog box/step/scene, or "Spank" or whatever nonsense).

Maybe a list of Colour,Line,Timeline_Event entries and if Timeline Event is not added the user can't click on the line. Maybe clickable lines would be bold or a different colour.

|Portrait| She licked her lips lasciviously...all of them.
|___|

Kind of like an RPG dialog box sort of thing. You could even add an optional "mumble" sound effect to suggest speech.

The dialog would be able to pause the currently playing timeline (or let it keep running). You would have an event to start the playhead again.

This would allow us to create interactive visual novels. Combine it with a positionable/aimable camera on the timeline and FVNE becomes even more powerful.

One other thing I was thinking: a standalone "player" that can accept links, download the content and play visual novels. But that starts to bring security and potential malicious actors into play so it might not be worth the exposure.