Programming Blog 2 by Iman Shabani

Hello everyone. Last week I mostly worked on a new dialogue system. I won’t bore you with details and will go straight to general steps and the results so far.

• Step 1 is to create the main structure for this system. For this I designed 3 rough designs and we chose the one we want to use.
• Step 2 is implementing the actual functionality of the system. So far I accomplished these two steps.
• Step 3 would be creating a few sequence actions and events to control the system via kismet. I’ll start this one in a day or two.
• The last step is polishing, including all kinds of tweaks and fixing possible problems. I won’t start this step at least for a few weeks until we actually start to use dialogue system for the final game.

Following is some of the features so far:

• Main goal for this system was to minimize the manual work needed to be done by one of the team members and the result is pretty satisfying.
• There is a conversation queue in this system that if by any chance the game received request for more than one conversation at a time, we enqueue them and play them in order.
• Ability to control the visibility of subtitles in real time, for example through options menu.
• Ability to change the general volume and pitch for dialogues.
• I also added some properties to help control delay and play time via archetypes, plus some controlling properties.

As I said the main goal here is to minimize the work needed by the one who wants to manage dialogues, and also level designer who needs to handle dialogues in kismet.There is still some features I need to add and after that I will start the third step. I will let you know when some of those are in place.Thanks for reading.