Reply To: Dialogue Tree First Impressions / Eval / Requests
Hey there,
Thanks for the quick, and more importantly, detailed and thoughtful response – I look forward to checking these changes out.
Re #1 & 2: – Awesome I’ll play around with this when I see the update pop on the asset store!
Re #3: Thankfully this is the one I was least concerned about, and understand your reasoning behind it. While I do prefer Dialogue Trees as Left to Right as a whole (but FSMs and BTs strictly top down!) – it’s probably because I spent a while working in one writing quests/dialogue for an MMO and got used to that flow. Game didn’t get released, and can’t post a screenshot of the tool but Articy Draft has a similar layout:
http://www.nevigo.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/02-Fictiorama-Studios-ad-Screenshot-01.jpg
However all that said, the DT is sharing resources with the BT and FSM and your preference for top down DT’s – it makes no sense for me to expect you to spend time to change that 🙂 My prime concern was actually just associating the connections aligned at the bottom, with the choices aligned at the side. I’ll take a look and see if I can think of low impact ideas to help that (like maybe slight color coding or something) if it’s indeed even still an issue after I get used to it.
Re #4 – Awesome! Yeah I didn’t even realize you could click on that textbox on the connection until now 🙂 But even still, yeah it makes more sense for them to be in the MC node, so thank you for that!
Re Custom nodes:
This was mostly a comment of “if some of these options aren’t possible / you don’t have time to code them, if I could implement some of these features on my own MC node, but you’ve addressed nearly all the concerns I put in the video.
However there were a couple things I didn’t include because they’re highly specific and not everyone would have a use for them, so I wouldn’t expect you to make them part of the “official” node.
1) We’re using Wwise audio for our project, so we can’t use Unity Audio clips at all (it’s a totally separate pipeline for audio), so in order to play audio I play string-based events through code. Example snip from one of my custom action nodes I made:
|
1 2 3 |
protected override void OnExecute() { WwiseAudioMaster.Instance.PlayEvent(soundEventName.value, agent.gameObject); |
So when we do audio synced with dialogue I’m wondering how we best hook that up?
2) I was thinking about the idea of portrait overrides for certain nodes or, possibly even live portraits (2d skeletal sprite animated). So for instance:
Here I might want to override Jesse the Shopkeeper’s portrait expression to ‘Angry’ when the player decides to leave right away. (but with an attitude like that he probably doesn’t deserve the business! 🙂 )
_____
For both of these things it might be nice if I could make custom versions of Say and Multiple Choice dialogue nodes to add some string fields to them that could then have these actions inside.
Otherwise, is my best option to use separate action nodes that hook into the dialogue nodes? If so what is the proper way to do it?
In the above image I have 2 mock examples, #2 is my Play Audio for Wwise action and #5 is my Override Portrait action. Would this be the way to do it? If so, does the addition of that #2 node screw up the “Show Last Dialogue Text” feature you implemented?
So the ideal for us would be to tailor the nodes with some of these things that would suit our project, but not be a burden on others, but barring that knowing the proper workflow in this situation is the next best thing.
___
Oh and I haven’t done much with localization – not even on my radar yet, but would this system eventually be able to work with a localization system/string database? (I’ve not ever set one of these up so I don’t know much about it other than that it is a thing 🙂
Thanks, as always. You’re awesome!