Figured it out (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

So I think I figured it out. I’ve built up the new system and I think I’ve understood how I can make this work. The final step of this process is building all the standard access methods so I can use this easily.

This was a wild ride that was almost archeology as it’s been years since I’ve touched my old dialogue code. I made a few errors when I wrote it that made it very inflexible. My fault but a few years of experience will always create an improvement.

Skip to the end if you want to avoid boring technical details.

So now the access methods. This is basically where I now need to create some clean simple ways of linking these templates together. When I have a template I could have a piece of dialogue that is the character saying “Hello what can I do for you”. The new system should let me inject a reply for the player that links to a different part of the template.

So if the player is doing a quest they might say “remind me of my quest” that links to the quest explanation. From the writer's perspective the template would have the generic greeting and a different element called “quest reminder”. So while doing a “quest” for the NPC when you talk to them a dialogue option will be “what did you need me to do?”.

Unlike the standard system the “quest reminder” contains the player question so I could say. Run Standard Greeting; if quest == true then add quest reminder. Previously the “options” or replies for the player would be part of the greeting dialogue and you would need a unique piece of dialogue for every different set of replies you might want the player to give.

This becomes very context sensitive where you have lots of duplicated dialogue for the parts that remain the same.

I just need to make the system easy to use. So far I’ve got the simple stuff drafted but I want flexibility. Like the ability to say, Run Greeting dialogue, link to Comment About Island, link to comment about player or link to comment about weather ext.

So much of an NPC structure is shared between NPC’s so this should help speed things up.

I think that all probably wasn’t very clear but I the short answer is think I found the solution to my problem. Since I moved to the new dialogue UI element I have the flexibility to run dialogue directly from a template and blend between player and AI responses much more dynamically.

That’s all for now. I’m feeling much better with this and it’s given me a little more energy which is nice. I’m going to get back to work!