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Triggered diminishing / progressive dialogs?
donperk
Member Posts: 200 Arc User
I've experimented for some time with this concept and looked at a ton of tutorials, but I can't find anything that addresses how to do the following in a dialog tree. (I'm aware I can do something similar with hidden interact objects, but I want to do it in a tree.)
Suppose you are interrogating a computer and it gives you four topics to learn about:
TOPIC SELECTION
* Orion Mushrooms
* Bajoran aversion to pink tribbles
* Hirogen hygiene
* I don't want to learn about any of these
The last topic is a dialog endpoint. But the first three will display the information and eventually lead back to the topic selection page.
Suppose I decide, perversely, to read the topic on Hirogen hygiene. Since I'll never want to read about that again, it would be nice if the topic list changed to:
TOPIC SELECTION
* Orion Mushrooms
* Bajoran aversion to pink tribbles
* I don't want to learn about any of these
Or, if I chose the topic of Orion Mushrooms, it turns out that several other Orion flora are mentioned in the article. Upon return it would be nice to see:
TOPIC SELECTION
* Orion edible flowers
* Orion flesh-eating flowers
* Bajoran aversion to pink tribbles
* I don't want to learn about any of these
It seems to me I should be able to have a dynamic dialog like this since dialog choices can be made visible/invisible through triggers. But it seems there is no way to have a dialog choice's state change based on reaching a particular dialog -- something you can do with other object states.
Is this currently just not possible in the Foundary? Or have I missed something fundamental.
And yes, I know you can have multiple repeated branches in a dialog tree, but something like the above would have an unmanageable number of choice variations.
Suppose you are interrogating a computer and it gives you four topics to learn about:
TOPIC SELECTION
* Orion Mushrooms
* Bajoran aversion to pink tribbles
* Hirogen hygiene
* I don't want to learn about any of these
The last topic is a dialog endpoint. But the first three will display the information and eventually lead back to the topic selection page.
Suppose I decide, perversely, to read the topic on Hirogen hygiene. Since I'll never want to read about that again, it would be nice if the topic list changed to:
TOPIC SELECTION
* Orion Mushrooms
* Bajoran aversion to pink tribbles
* I don't want to learn about any of these
Or, if I chose the topic of Orion Mushrooms, it turns out that several other Orion flora are mentioned in the article. Upon return it would be nice to see:
TOPIC SELECTION
* Orion edible flowers
* Orion flesh-eating flowers
* Bajoran aversion to pink tribbles
* I don't want to learn about any of these
It seems to me I should be able to have a dynamic dialog like this since dialog choices can be made visible/invisible through triggers. But it seems there is no way to have a dialog choice's state change based on reaching a particular dialog -- something you can do with other object states.
Is this currently just not possible in the Foundary? Or have I missed something fundamental.
And yes, I know you can have multiple repeated branches in a dialog tree, but something like the above would have an unmanageable number of choice variations.
Post edited by donperk on
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Click on a dialogue box window and you'll see at the button the buttons listed with their trigger UI.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
As the OP indicates, I'm aware of that. I just can't figure out how to make those button options trigger from having reached a dialog screen within the same tree. If you know how, please elaborate!
To explain further, from a technical perspective, I've wired up an button to hide itself after its corresponding dialog prompt has been displayed, but on return to the top of the dialog tree, the button is still there.
Note that I'm not exiting the tree, this is happening while I'm still traversing it.
Ah sorry, use the Dialogue Reached trigger to make your buttons visible or invisible
A simple example
First Dialogue Box - Hello
button 1 - Hello there!
button 2
You already said hello! -> Complete
Button 1 would have Visible -> Hidden trigger when the dialogue box "My Name is Zorbane" is reached (therefore Dialogue Reached)
Button 2 would have Hidden -> Visible trigger on the same one
I hope this helps, it's hard to represent a tree in text
A note the dialogue reached trigger will not work on a storyboard dialogue, however it will work on Dialogue with Contact, Default Text and Map dialogue popups.
Note 2: You can actually mess this up and have NO buttons available sometimes. I've done this before
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
What I suggested in post #2 does work... just not in the Foundry testbed. UGH!!!!
I've literally been struggling with this for six days (about 20 minutes a day) and finally published a test project (c.f.: Klingon Mission "Dialog Test" by @donperk) that shows that all of this works just fine in game -- though it fails miserably in the Foundry testbed.
Thanks for your patient responses.
What you want is a specific trigger called "Dialog Promt Reached." If you go into the button states you'll find you can specify when each button becomes visible and when it becomes invisible again. You can specify the conditions upon which these actions happen, one of them being dialog prompt reached. It will list all the compatible dialog trees on the map. Select the dialog tree you want ant the exact dialog box where you want the change to occur.
(Note: Dialog Prompt Reached doesn't work with story popup dialogs, but it will work with all others.)
NP
If you think this is a bug you should post this in the bug forum, and list the mission ID
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
I'll do that. Thanks!
If you run a published mission from the game, the behavior is as expected. It just barfs in the Foundry editor when you run the map or dialog from there.
Now that I'm thinking about it, there were some changes to Dialogue Reached. Previously you couldn't use it on a Dialogue with NPC or Default text. It might have broken something.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
Which type of dialog are you using? I'd like to replicate your set up of I can. See if we can nail down what's going wrong.
The failure only occurs if the new pop-up dialog has not been published. After publication, it works in both the Foundry and in-game.
I've been able to reproduce this behavior a few times now. The published map referenced above works fine in the Foundry now, but didn't prior to the dialog's publication.
I'm going to try adding another pop-up dialog and see if it fails prior to publication on a map that has already been published.
EDIT: Okay -- additional testing reveals that once the map has been published, pop-up dialog triggers work fine, even for dialogs that are brand new. I'm going to do one more test with a brand new map that I WON'T publish as a sanity check.
EDIT 2: Okay, now I'm really confused. I just created a brand new mission that is essentially identical to the one above and the dialog triggers are now working, even though the map is not published. I will note that my editor crashed twice just before doing this test and I elected to have STOL re-scan all my assets. Perhaps that fixed it. *sigh*
For the test that I'm doing right now I'm using a pop-up dialog that activates upon map entry (no defined trigger.)
I have two buttons that disappear after their prompts have been displayed and a third that appears after the second button's prompt has been displayed.
Please look at the Klingon Mission "Dialog Test" by @donperk to see exactly what I've done.
I'd love for someone to independently verify this.
Like I said earlier, it was driving me nuts because I knew I was doing the right thing, but my original mission wasn't in a state to publish and I had no idea at the time that publishing would affect the Foundry sandbox. I finally gave up on in in that mission and waited util it was stable before looking into this problem.
My tests show that as soon as I placed the map on the storyboard and added an objective, the triggers worked properly.
Oh, I am so glad someone else is seeing it now. I was about to write it off to my files being out of sync.
As far as whether or not there was an objective? You may be right. I dived right into the dialog on the example. But the second time I tried, I did everything "by the book". I'll try it again tomorrow and see if I get the same result.
Thanks for looking into this -- getting secondary validation really helps.