Re: [Adonthell-devel] modular dialogues

[Kai Sterker]

On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 10:30:03 +0200 Alexandre Courbot wrote:

> The idea seems very good and realistic to me, but we have to look at
> how it will change dialogs in practice. Right now, for Waste's Edge,
> there is AFAIK no dialog that would take advantage of such a feature,
> simply because they are all very different. It could save time in the
> case of characters who could talk the player about the same topic (the
> dialogs would nearly be the same, and we could use the feature you
> described to customize them a little bit), but could you quickly
> describe and example? I don't really see an example where it would be
> worth, although I'm sure there must be some! :)

I can see several opportunities where it could be helpful:

1. If the player did something that has large consequences, many NPCs
would know (and talk) about it. We can write two or three versions of
that (NPC likes or dislikes it, etc.) and add it to various NPCs. That's
not strictly required, but I think its nice if NPCs appear to take an
interest into the player's doings. ("Wow! I've heard you've slain that
dragon! Good work" or "Didn't you know the dragons are nearly extinct?
You can't just go and kill them, you idiot"). That's more for the
ambience of the game.

2. NPCs might react differently if the player is good or evil, belongs
to the NPC faction or not, etc. I don't think we should pack this all
into a single dialogue. That would get way too bloated. (Again, look at
Orloth or Lucia.) But there might be topics they will talk about in all
cases. They can be written once and included in all of the NPC's
dialogues.

3. Important NPCs might have multiple dialogues that reflect the
progress the player made. (See Jelom for example). Basically this is
also a way to prevent them from getting too bloated. But they may have
side quests thay offer at any point of the game. Again, they only need
to be written once and included into each of the dialogues.

4. To improve the ambience, some NPCs could have several topics just for
smalltalk. ("Nice weather today." or "There weren't so much bandits
around in the old days".) Again, we could write a few such threads and
include them with various NPCs.

Those are a few cases I can think of now. There might be others too.

Even if there is a very special dialogue for a single NPC, it might make
sense to divide it into smaller parts, to make it easier to understand
and maintain. Just like you'd split a single problem into multiple
classes in OOP.

Kai