Streamlining long conversations [Suggested feature - 2 way chat action]

andiliddell

Hi all,

There's some points in my game where the player has extended "chats" with other NPCs, where they basically take it in turns to say a line or two, for a few rounds of back and forth.

The standard "dialog action" means you end up with a huge chain of actions in the editor, each time, each character says something in response, for something that could be handled in a neat little new action called a "chat" perhaps?

I've setup something that works for the time being, using parameters. See screenshot below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RKrfTMRn-oI-2CNJ6C93zIGSS9TXUugO/view?usp=sharing

You get the whole 2 person chat in one Node, making it easier to read, edit and collapse - and it's much easier to look at too, in a busy actionlist.

Sadly it has a few issues:
1) These dialogue lines wont be collected by the language system because they're parameter strings.
2) The Run actionlist node UI is too narrow, meaning it takes up alot of vertical space, and input boxes are narrow
3) It's limited to the amount of parameters I've pre-created (8 in this case)- it would be lovely to just be able to set the number of dialog lines at the top and just fill em all in.

Anyway, I thought this was an interesting half-way-house, and wondered if Chris would consider something like this in a future version to streamline these big 2 person chats, and have them collected by the language system?

Cheers

ChrisIceBox

I'll give it some thought, thanks for sharing.