Fixed position for dialogue icons possible?
Hello there,
I am currently trying my best to get to know Adventure Creator and putting together a little something in my free-time.
My idea is to use an icon based dialogue system with three fixed icons: telling the truth, asking a question, telling a lie.
If an option is not viable it's supposed to be greyed out.
Those are currently placeholder graphics repesented by an angel emoji, an question mark emoji and a devil emoji. So far so good.
It works fine when I have all three options enabled:
But when one option (e.g. the question option) is "depleted", the third icon moves to its place instead and is overlapping the "greyed out" option which is essentially just a background image:
I tried a couple of things already like adding "inactive" dialogue options to the Conversation menu.
That didn't work as intended. Or adding empty dialogue options which are turned on so that the second option is essentially still available but ... well ... empty.
I would like to keep the positions of the icons fixed in place.
Here are my current settings for the Conversation menu. The settings are basically identical except for the positions and Slot Indexes. I am using three seperate DialogLists because of the positioning.
Thanks in advance and thanks for the awesome tools your providing!
Cheers!
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Welcome to the commuity, @Wesk89.
Mapping to "Fixed Slot Index" refers to the options that remain visible, so which option each element gets mapped to will vary as you modify which options are visible.
For example, setting "Slot index to display" to 1 means that it'll always show the 2nd visible in the list (0 being the 1st).
To always show a specific option, regardless of the state of other options, you can map instead to "Fixed Option ID", which will refer to the option's unique ID number. This number is listed beside its name in the Conversation editor.
Hi @ChrisIceBox, thanks for your reply and thanks for the welcome!
I currently have one big action list for the conversation where I am toggling dialogue options on and off, accordingly. Like this.
So, this specific conversation does not consist of three options but nine.
I guess the better way would be to use "Dialogue : Rename option" and only use three options then, right?
I mean, it's basically just changing "Dialogue : toggle option" to "Dialogue : Rename option" anyway. Unless I am missing something.
Because the thing I didn't mention is that I am, of course, using the labels to preview the answer the character will be giving.
Thanks again!
"I guess the better way would be to use "Dialogue : Rename option" and only use three options then, right?
I mean, it's basically just changing "Dialogue : toggle option" to "Dialogue : Rename option" anyway. Unless I am missing something."
That one doesn't make sense, I noticed.
Guess I have to get back to the drawing board.
Having 9 options instead of 3 would still involve the same technique - but let's stick with your first post's example of 3 for the moment and build it up from there.
View your Conversation's Inspector and note the ID numbers of your Truth, Lie, and Question options. Then return to the Menu, and enter these numbers into their respective elements - first setting Map to to Fixed Option ID. That should get each element to only show the same option each time.
These elements will still get hidden when their linked option is turned off, but the visible elements will remain in place. The background icons won't show either, but we can sort that out once the above is working.
The other approach to this would be to have an alternative "off" option for each of the regular options, so that your Conversation's Inspector would look something like:
You could then keep using the Fixed Slot Index option you're using above, and then just make sure e.g. "Truth-off" is shown if "Truth" is hidden, and vice-versa. This could be done through a custom script to avoid having to set their states manually.
Thanks again for the reply and your patience!
For the record, this is what the Conversation menu now looks like including what the options actually mean. With 9 options, I didn't mean 9 simultaneously shown options but options following other options. (Sorry, not a native speaker here.
)
I've been playing around for a bit yesterday, and accidentally used the alternative option you describe by creating three additional Conversation options with an empty label and changing the Icon texture to the black-white version:
That actually works pretty well except for the fact that those options are, of course, still options that can be pressed. I am currently linking them back to the Dialogue : start conversation node as a workaround. Which is fine for the time being.
Looks like this and works:
When e.g. the question options are "running out" I toggle the empty option for the question on and it stays in place like in the screenshot above:
This one is currently giving me headaches because thinking about having to do this for all options and conversations is quite the task.
Maybe I am also heading in the complete wrong direction.
It's possible - through script - to have e.g. the "Lie off" option turn on automatically if all of the "Lie" options are off.
With the number of options you have, though, it'd still be a big task to configure such a component with the necessary data.
I'm sure we can come up with a more simple solution, but I'll need to be more clear on the situation.
Is this to say that only 3 options (Truth, Question, Lie) should be shown at once? And would these options always be grouped up together?
Essentially: would it be possible to separate your 9 options into 3 separate Conversations (each with their own Truth/Question/Lie options)?
If so, the first option I described would be the way to go. If you ensure that the IDs always match (i.e. Truth = 0, Question = 1, etc), then you can set up your Conversation menu to always show these in a fixed position.
Sorry, I have been kind of busy.
I now have a solution that works for me.
I've written a tool to write my dialogue into a CSV file including a "ToggleDialogOption,ID" line at the end.
I'm using a modified version of your ImportSpeechEditor script to import the CSV file, rename the DialogOption accordingly and add a toggle dialogue option depending on the filename, if no "ToggleOption,ID" line is found in the CSV file.
Thanks a bunch for your support and giving me a couple of ideas!