How to link Story objectives with Map Dialogs?

seraphantilles

I want to have an objective on my Story line be linked with the completion of a pop-up dialog on a certain map.

So I start like this:

(1) (Story) Player enters map.
(2) (Story) Player interacts with an object.
(3) (Map) When: Component Complete of (2) fires, then start a Pop-Up Dialog.

What I really want to do is:

(4) (Story) When: Component Complete of (3) fires, then exit the Map and go to a different Map.

This sounds simple but it's not possible. So I tried a different approach:

(4) (Map) When: Component Complete of (3) fires, a hidden "Invisible Object" becomes visible.
(5) (Story) When: Component Complete of (4) fires, then start a Pop-Up Dialog in the Story line.
(6) (Story) Go to the next map.

This is also not possible however, because oddly, even though I first set the Invisible Object to become visible based on the Component Complete of the Map's Pop-up Dialog in (3), later when I added the Component Complete of the Invisible Object to the requirements for the Pop-Up Dialog in the storyline in step (5), the Invisible Object's state transition condition resets to "Immediately" and the option to specify a "Component Complete" as an option is no longer visible! WTH?!

:mad: :eek:

So... how exactly do you make something in your story dependent upon the completion of a component that's in your map, if the option is hidden?! I'm becoming very frustrated with this... please help thanks.

thegreendragoon1

I'm a little confused as to what you're trying to do. Why to you need a map dialog over a standard story popup dialog? It might be easier if you could describe what's happening in the scene. From the player perspective what do you want to happen?

skydawnknight

thegreendragoon1 wrote: »

I'm a little confused as to what you're trying to do. Why to you need a map dialog over a standard story popup dialog? It might be easier if you could describe what's happening in the scene. From the player perspective what do you want to happen?

I'm a little confused as well. I "think" I might know what you mean, so I'll try to answer this. If you need a dialog to happen in between your object interact and the map transition, then just place the dialog on the storyboard right after the Interact With Object objective, instead of putting it on the map. The "Next Map" dialog should appear right after that.

Pop-up dialogs on the map are different from the ones placed in the Story tab. They do not directly correspond with story dialogs/objectives. I believe the reason why your object reverted back to the "Immediately" trigger is because when you place an object as an objective in the story, it is no longer allowed to be triggered by objects outside of the story. I hope that made some type of sense...

If you want an objects to trigger based on a dialog you put on the map, you can use "Dialog Prompt Reached", which allows you to access map dialogs to trigger effects. Again though, this has no direct effect on the storyboard.

diogene0

It's not clear if you don't use the foundry language. I was really confused when you asked your question on the channel, i think it's even less clear now.

I still think you should stick to story dialogs. Copy-paste your text to story dialogs, delete your map popups, and use "objective complete/in progress" triggers to change the state of your objects and NPCs. Yes, it may happen when the player is reading the popup so he doesn't see the animations but there is no way around, unless you change the state of your objects or npcs between two different objectives with no dialog popups when they get completed.

You may just get rid off the necessity for the player to see the animations or change the progression of your story because it won't work. I hope i got it this time.

As a general rule, do not use popups on your map, unless you want to hide easter eggs and optional objectives and triggers on your map. There is no other use for these popups. It's very hard to maintain such missions afterwards, if you choose to use popups on your map instead of story dialogs.

seraphantilles

Story dialog pop-ups and their series of prompts cannot be used as triggers for NPC visibility on the map. Therefore they are useless for what I am doing.

What I am doing is, I have a ship that decloaks during the dialog. One of the dialog prompts triggers the NPC visibility and it plays the decloak animation. Then subsequently another dialog prompt triggers it to become invisible, meanwhile an exact duplicate of it becomes visible, then warps out. To the player it appears as though the enemy ship has decloaked, then warped out during the conversation, seamlessly.

The only problem I have is that at the completion of the dialog, there is no way to then push the storyline forward from there to allow the player to chase after the ship who just warped out.

What I have done as a work-around is to create a place marker on the storyline where the player must go after the map's dialog pop-up finishes, and from there, they warp out.

However I don't like this solution because it's still possible for the player to ignore the dialog pop-up and just go straight to the circle on their mini-map, then jump to the next map without ever seeing the enemy ship they are supposed to be chasing.

I think it's a major flaw in the Foundry that you cannot use Storyline dialog pop-up prompts as triggers for NPC visibility on the map. It's also a major flaw that you cannot have the completion of objectives on your map (like killing enemies or completing dialog) be used as pre-requisites before aspects of the storyline can move forward. This hard separation between the map and the storyline is really a huge bug, or design flaw, and needs to be fixed.

I spent quite awhile trying to come up with a work-around for this problem and the fact that I had to add unnecessary "busy work" to my mission just to make the storyline consistent is really lame.

seraphantilles

diogene0 wrote: »

I still think you should stick to story dialogs. Copy-paste your text to story dialogs, delete your map popups, and use "objective complete/in progress" triggers to change the state of your objects and NPCs.

Dialogs on the storyline do not get "Objective Complete" triggers. You can put the dialog on the storyline but it does not show up in the triggers.

EDIT: I did discover that "Dialog With Contact" can be used successfully for this on the Storyline. You still have to use a clone of the NPC but it lets you use the storyline.

First the setup is:
you need two NPCs that are identical with the same name, right on top of each other. One will have the "cloak" animation and one will have the "warp out" animation. The "cloak" one will be set to appear at the completion of objective (1) below, and to disappear upon the completion of objective (2). The "warp out" one will be set to appear after the completion of objective (2) and to disappear after the completion of objective (3).

The storyline steps are:
(1) Interact with Object -- makes NPC Contact Appear.
(2) Dialog with Contact -- talk to their ship. (Caveats: their ship must be within a few KM of the player's ship in order for the "Dialog with Contact" button to appear. There is no configurable radius, and it will always say "Talk to [Name of Contact]" -- unfortunately you can't change this to say "Hail [Name of Contact]" etc. You must edit the dialog in the storyline to set the NPC's costume, and none of the dialog can be used to trigger any "Dialog Prompt" triggers in the map, which is still a bad limitation.)
(3) Interact with Object -- use an invisible object of large size around the player's ship. I used the text, "Track warp vector." The completion of this objective will cause the warped-out NPC to disappear. (Caveat: this is necessary because otherwise the NPC ship will still appear appx. 10km away; the warp-out animation doesn't fully get rid of it.)

[snip]
As a general rule, do not use popups on your map, unless you want to hide easter eggs and optional objectives and triggers on your map. There is no other use for these popups.

Yes there is! The use of these pop-ups is that each of their prompts can trigger NPC visibility and other things.

It's true that you can make a workaround in the way I've described, but I still prefer the flexibility of the dialog prompt triggers. This lets you do a lot more different dialog, even branching dialog, in between options, without then having to resort to "scan object" garbage.

It's very hard to maintain such missions afterwards, if you choose to use popups on your map instead of story dialogs.

This is a flaw in the Foundry. It needs to be fixed.

EDIT: The workaround I found is OK, but it would still be useful on many levels to have interaction links between storyline and map.

seraphantilles

Also: I did try placing an invisible object with an "Interact" objective in the storyline between individual dialogs and that is really terrible as a solution, because the player has to click the "Interact" button in the middle of the screen. This breaks the continuity of dialog and is generally a bad work-around compared to the other, still bad, but slightly less bad work-arounds.

diogene0

The player doesn't need to see the animations, really. Your player will hear the warp out and cloaking sounds anyway.

thegreendragoon1

Perhaps this would be a good place to use a warp effect. It's usually used to reduce map transitions but in this case, you need an excuse to have a final interact and that could be it. Or is could be something simpler such as scanning for the ships warp trail.

Keep in mind also that while a map dialog can't be triggered bu an objective complete directly, it can be triggered by a component complete/reached that also happens to be tied to an objective.

pendra3780

seraphantilles wrote: »

What I have done as a work-around is to create a place marker on the storyline where the player must go after the map's dialog pop-up finishes, and from there, they warp out.

I'd use "Waypoint None" as the warp out place marker.
The interaction happens, the guy warps out. The helm then reports that the "Ship warped out, pursuit course plotted on map! OOC Scan (V) points to the proper direction OOC".
Then spawn up a visible beacon in the middle of the reach marker. Also make the beacon interactable out of story. Call it something like "Engage warp drive" with Instant length and make it hide when interacted.

With that, the player has next to no chance the find the leave zone on his own. He is mostly forced to go through the map dialog. When that happens he is given a point on the map and a blinking beacon. Since the space is 3D, the player may have a problem actually finding the proper point even with help on map. With the interactable beacon, the Scan (v) will point to its direction, as it should be the nearest active interact, even thou it does nothing really. So the player can find the leave point and the mission continues.