How do I set choices?

gigaman123

How can I get dialogue choices to be set throughout the story?

For my foundry mission, in the beginning, you'll have to set whether your a High Admiral, Admiral, Low Admiral, Captain or Commander.

I know the Purity foundry missions done it. I also remember another foundry mission where it's done it.

How can I achieve this?

castsbugc

There are a set of metadata tags that do this, basically think like html.
[NickName]: Character handle name
[LastName]: Last name of the character
[FirstName]: First name of the character
[Rank]: Rank of the character (Starfleet/KDF, not Federation Diplomatic Corps)
[ShipName]: Plain name of currently active ship
[ShipFullName]: Name with prefix (U.S.S. or I.K.V.) of currently active ship
[ShipRegistry]: Registry number of currently active ship
[ShipType]: Type of currently active ship (in-game name, not Starfleet/KDF class name)

basically put the brackets and those terms into your text, and it will pull the information from your characters data
so:
"greetings [nickname] of the [shipfullname]" would read to the player "greetings castsbugc of the U.S.S. Arcadia"

gigaman123

That wasn't what I was talking about...

Maybe the example i used was misleading.

In a foundry mission, there was a set of choices you could make that carried on throughout the mission.

For example(hopefully a better one) In one of the Foundry missions you got to choose two seperate options before meeting this one guy. Those two options were Lover and Rival. If you chose Rival, the guy 's dialogue would be of him as he was a rival of you. If you chose lover, throughout the mission he'll speak to you as if he was.. well... your lover.

Hopefully that provides that necessary info.

gorillachops

Short Answer: Can't be done.

I know, it frustrates the hell out of me too. I myself am working on a mission where you're supposed to choose whether you believe what someone is telling you, or you think they're lying and don't choose to follow them. It's terrible.

I know the mission you're talking about. I remember it being on the Defiant interior, with Orions. Basically, your best bet with what I understand of the current Foundry system is to mark everything with a [Lover] or [Rival] in green font, before the rest of the dialogue in the button.

As for things like making certain dialogue options available with [Tier 5 Diplomacy] or [Tier 3 Romulan Reputation], or having different dialogue option depending on whether or not you completed 'Instillation 18' yet, or having [seduce the guard] dialogue options for Orions, or being able to pilot the shuttle THROUGH the dangerous ion storm (instead of going around it), because you have level 3 Pilot Specialization, or doing whatever the equivalent of rolling D6 for Arcana is in this game...

I don't know.

Sorry.

gorillachops

P.S. In short, the Foundry does not, in its current state, make proper provision fro Decision Trees. I advise that you look further into the topic of How to Lay Out Decision Trees in Games.

Best of Luck.

castsbugc

well, its can 'sort of' do it. Dialogs can be hidden or made visible based on a choice, like with objects...BUT they cannot be part of the main storyboard.

wombat140

And you'd have to make that choice again on each map, there is currently no way to make the effects of an action carry over from one map to another.

illcadia

wombat140 wrote: »

And you'd have to make that choice again on each map, there is currently no way to make the effects of an action carry over from one map to another.

Well... theoretically you could do it the hard way of having multiple copies of the map and having dialogue actually choose which map you get sent to. But that's super unwieldy and problematic for other reasons.

evilmark444

illcadia wrote: »

Well... theoretically you could do it the hard way of having multiple copies of the map and having dialogue actually choose which map you get sent to. But that's super unwieldy and problematic for other reasons.

I thought map transitions had to be part of the story board? And therfore could only have one option?

drogyn1701

Yes map transitions have to be linear. A->B->C etc. Those cannot branch. However, you can create the illusion of choice.

I'll give you an example from my mission Over There. Apologies for incoming lengthy explanation.

Basic premise is that you go to the Mirror Universe after they stole something from ours. You infiltrate an MU ship and get to where they store the technology. At this point, I present the player with a choice, destroy the stolen item, or let the MU guys keep it. From this point on, the only objective on the map is a reach marker at the end that says "Make your choice and escape."

The choice, is whether to activate a console in front of you or not. If you activate it, a dialogue comes up and enemies spawn along your path to the reach marker. This is done using the states tab on the NPCs. If you leave the console alone, you have a clear path to the exit.

Now, that choice cannot extend over to the next map, and the map after that. So what I do is have the player make the choice again. When you get to the next map, someone asks you what happened in a map dialogue (the bubble that you click and drag onto the map). You have two dialogue prompts where you say which choice you made. If you click one, I spawn enemy NPCs. If you click the other, I spawn friendly NPCs. (States tab, set them to become visible based on dialogue prompt reached).

Then in the final map, you return to the main mission giver and he asks "How did it go?" Based on your answer, he either berates you or congratulates you.

illcadia

evilmark444 wrote: »

I thought map transitions had to be part of the story board? And therfore could only have one option?

It's been a while since I experimented with my test mission, but I distinctly remember having a setup where you could interact with different objects on one map and get to two different maps- but I think that doing so was just zoning or something? So like you'd have a main map, and then two zone interacts to move you to different maps, but either of those maps would move you back to the main map.

Apologies if I've remembered it wrong, unfortunately I can't check what I did until the foundry comes back up.

drogyn1701

There's no way to, for example, transition from Map A to Map B or Map C. It has to be Map A then Map B then Map C.

However, if you don't leave Map A, there are some ways to have different paths based on player choice, basically by spawning or despawning objects based on things the player does.

Take a look at this tutorial I made a while back: http://starbaseugc.com/index.php/sto-ugc-tutorial/tutorial-give-the-player-a-choice-of-what-deck-to-go-to/

markhawkman

yeah, you can do some really complicated stuff with setting objects to appear or disappear based on (nonstory)dialog choices. This can be done to such a drastic extent that you essentially build two (or more) maps in one map and change the entire map to be something different based on the dialog choices.

example: Set a dialog to play as soon as you beam down to the effect of "beam to Borg or Romulan colony?"

Selecting Borg would populate the map with Borg Mobs and buildings, selecting Romulan would spawn Romulan assets.

The actual mission is the same, but the setting of the mission is different.