Feature Request: Automatic Speech Log

skitt2501

Most of us probably remember the good old days in the 80's and 90's where you had to take notes while playing most adventure games, usually writing down dialogue that sounds important or drawing our own maps for the King's Quest 5 desert... *shudder*. We may look back on that fondly, but I think we can all accept that those were symptoms of the limitations of technology and not intentional design choices.

That brings me to my feature request: a speech log which automatically records all dialogue into an accessible menu.

I'm aware that this can be done manually with the base AC package, but it's a fairly complicated process to copy all of the dialogue into discrete journal menu elements and then subsequently "show" each menu element as the dialogue is spoken. On top of that I can imagine the format of this journal menu getting quite messy as you add on more dialogue, and even worse if you allow the player to hear speech in any order (which I assume most of us prefer).

So if there is a relatively simple way to generate a speech log as dialogue is spoken I'm betting a lot of us would be very interested in that feature! Or if there is already a way to do so which is easier than I previously described, I'd love to hear it. Thanks!

ChrisIceBox

I would go half-and-half, I think.  No game is going to be the same so far as how such a log would be displayed, so I reckon the best way would be for AC to record the log as an array or list, and just make it very easy for custom script to access it.

skitt2501

That's along the lines of what I was thinking- just some way to streamline the process so that only a single function needs to be called in order to gather the speech and then show it in a customized menu. Do you think you'll try to work on this for one of the next updates (not that there's any rush)?

ChrisIceBox

Not sure about the very next update - the plan is for 1.43 to come out this week, so it may have to wait.  It's logged, either way.

skitt2501

Excellent, thank you as always!

Ene

Hi, i don't wanna repeat post that already exists so i'll ask here. Was this feature added at some point or is it still in development? I making a visual novel style dialogue in my game and i would really love to create a speech log that player can access if they accidentally skip some dialogue or don't pay enough attention.

ChrisIceBox

Yes, it's present - though for the reasons above, it's accessed through custom script. See the Manual's "Speech scripting" chapter:

KickStarter.runtimeVariables.GetSpeechLog ();

This returns an array of the SpeechLog class, which contains data of all spoken lines since the last save-file load.