Forums » Help » Dialogue trees

I'm creating a game that requires many dialogue trees. This is when the player talks to an NPC and is given a choice of things to say, leading to other conversation paths, and possibly changing some part of the game.

I wondered how best to do this in code, and if anyone has any tips - or if there are any useful classes or standard methodologies I should follow.

Thanks!

I do not use a lot of Dialogue, but I hate seeing posts go long without a response.
I found this link about writing a Dialogue Database Engine http://www.scribd.com/doc/17682546/Dynamic-Conversation-Engine-Concept

It seems to have a lot of research in the opening that might help you out!

I'll keep your issue in mind while I wander the internet some more.

There seems to be a ton of text in FTL I would try hitting them up on twitter as they seem to have a branchy choose stuff kinda setup

http://www.ftlgame.com

http://www.twitter.com/FTLgame

It's a fun game!

Thanks TigerJ, I've had read of that 1st link and I'm going to use a "predetermined conversation tree", I just don't know how best to implement this currently. Other sources I've read recommend using XML to store the dialogue. I want to do something fairly standard as I don't think there's any need to reinvent the wheel!

Was FTL game created with Impactjs btw?

Thanks TigerJ, dialogue trees are interesting to me because I've been playing Bioware games for quite a while and I'd like to experiment with using one of those systems I read about. I'm considering a linear mission based dialogue system like Galaxy on Fire uses but probably without all the voice acting because, hey all that audio design takes some doing am I right?

I think a dialogue editor is a must for dealing with the huge array of topics that need connecting from in game events, main quests to NPC responses. As an indie developer I think just setting up an XML based, keyword system would be a significant job by itself.

I agree a dialogue creator is a project in itself. I started wondering if I should build a useful GUI for creating dialogue and seeing it at a glance like a flowchart, which would then make it much easier than adding dialogue into your code.

I've got a dialogue system that combines jQuery controlled overlay with clickable topics that reveal themselves in linear fashion and that looks for the NPC's next response from an array and given the current count and mission stage updates the NPC text,

It does mean I have to maintain duplicate two sets of arrays for each dialogue though and will likely break when using direct canvas for IOS.