Dialogue tree script software

Greetings fellow codexianites,

I'm wondering what software/schema can be used for dialgoe trees, I remember spotting an article about it a while ago but the ancient Codex forums now has no topic-based search :/

Ideally it would have scripting support too(Although I guess it could just be text with <tags>), so you can actually use it to implement skill checks/cutscenes/etc. I wonder if Python would be good for that...

The FOnline one is a very powerful and convenient to use one, imo.



It lets you write funcs to use shorter scripts directly in dialog (like in this example I just made "teleport to map"), you can edit and make variables just in the same very program etc. The engine is also capable of doing an own game, Multiplayer/Singleplayer, not just a fallout game. There are better ones to use out there I'm sure, but I am very satisfied with it.

I use a program called ChatMapper, pretty easy to use and shows you the different branches of dialogue

You're asking about something that will interface intimately with the rest of your game.

Blocking Variables, attributes pre-requisites, random dialogs, timers, float barks, interruptible NPC to NPC dialogs, expressions, generalized scripts etc etc.

That is not to say that a barebones dialog flowchart will not work, but it has to have metadata support where you can create a attribute (for ex: CHA) and a condition for the dialog (let's say, CHA > 5), and the game when reading the dialog needs to parse that out and interpret it on it's system - would be nice to have some sanity measures, such as ranges for CHA, check for impossible conditions (from the ranges), check if CHA is actually a attribute instead of something you mistyped etc.


What i'm trying to say is that for the "dialog editor", what it creates is just data. Things like that editor up there, while nice, are tightly coupled to the game they target so they won't be any fucking use at all for a new game.

Normally dialog editors don't chose to go generic, and put in some kind of script support with a few conveniences (like the pre execution python blocking boolean expression and post condition python expression on bloodlines dialogs), but this means you must already have thought about the kind of dialog system you want.

I hacked together something like this for myself, once, as a Python module. It wasn't too tough and worked nicely, though it had no gui. It used its own little mini-language for the dialogue files, with tag-like keywords for structures like "dialogue_node", "response", "condition", "trigger", "set_global", "check_stat" and that sort of thing. Used a simple python list as a rudimentary object stack to keep track of parent/child relationships and whatnot. The module would then parse the dialogue file at runtime and "compile" it to in-engine objects.

An approach like this isn't quite as user-friendly as you might like, but it gives you a lot more control over what's possible and what's not. Also, once everything's setup, actual dialogue scripting will go a whole lot faster.

edited for it's != its fuck...