Big brain challenge - non-tree dialogue system?

[CryptRat]

One of my favorite dialogue systems is actually when you have to convince demons in the Shin Megami games to join you. It's randomized enough that even if you meet the same demon type, you never know exactly how it will respond (although when you do it often enough you learn how they respond and when to push forward or keep back) and the failure states are dangerous enough that can't just blindly click through the options available.

In Demon (the rogue-like) choosing to initiate a negotiation is often critical and that's great.

 

[V_K]

But it is pretty much just a one branch dialogue tree.

Nope. You're using those terms too loosely. A "one-branch tree" would be a dialog where there's exactly one option. What you probably meant is a tree with a maximum depth of one, but that's still not technically correct applied to keyword system, because in such a tree dialog would end after one input and have to be restarted.
Technically, you can of course represent a table with a complete graph - i.e. one where every node connects to every other node. But that wouldn't be strictly a tree because by definition in a tree there should be exactly one path between any two nodes, and a complete graph has an infinite number of those. Although often RPG dialog trees aren't really trees in that regard either.
Yes, I'm being pointlessly anal. But so is claiming that keywords are a subclass of dialog trees.

 

[Duckard]

Pedantic rant about graph theory.

Found the programmer.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

The idea of parallel system for combat, dialogue, and skills felt cumbersome, so I ultimately shelved the concept

You could have shelved combat instead, or made it really simple. It's just the matter of what your goals are, core gameplay-wise - whether you want to have an RPG built around diplomacy, or just a traditional RPG with slightly more spicy dialogs.

That's a very lazy and dismissive remark. It's not as simple as that. Devising a skill and ability system to give depth and reactivity to an abstract like conversations (while still being intuitive) is complicated enough. Merging it within a mechanical framework to deal with more literal and concrete physical challenges is a tall order. At best you wind up with a system of abilities and skills that are extremely vague in scope and resolution systems that are either too involved, or not involved enough.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The waypoint based narrative detailed in this post is worth mentioning.

I don't think the author of this has much experience with CRPG tools, just tools used in visual novels/walking simulators. What she's essentially describing is already implemented in branching dialogue trees that loop back to earlier in the conversation.

 

[V_K]

The idea of parallel system for combat, dialogue, and skills felt cumbersome, so I ultimately shelved the concept

You could have shelved combat instead, or made it really simple. It's just the matter of what your goals are, core gameplay-wise - whether you want to have an RPG built around diplomacy, or just a traditional RPG with slightly more spicy dialogs.

That's a very lazy and dismissive remark. It's not as simple as that. Devising a skill and ability system to give depth and reactivity to an abstract like conversations (while still being intuitive) is complicated enough. Merging it within a mechanical framework to deal with more literal and concrete physical challenges is a tall order. At best you wind up with a system of abilities and skills that are extremely vague in scope and resolution systems that are either too involved, or not involved enough.

What I'm saying is that normally in an RPG you have detailed combat and combat-supporting systems, while everything else is severely simplified - often abstracted to binary skill checks. Now if you try to take this template of an RPG with a detailed and complex combat system and try to add and equally detailed and complex dialog system on top of it - I can fully understand how this can become unwieldy, especially if the two systems have fundamentally different rules and mechanics. But these two approaches - detailed combat + barebones dialog vs. detailed combat + detailed dialog - are not the only options out there. It'd be completely viable to build the game entirely around diplomacy, with combat playing a minor role and relegated to binary skillchecks. If you have a simplistic combat system with no equipment or consumables, no hitpoints and only one or two combat skills (the way diplomacy is approached in a traditional RPG), you're freeing up a lot of resources to better support the dialog gamplay.

Pedantic rant about graph theory.

Found the programmer.

Former programmer. I'm doing cultural studies now. Not joking.

 

[Duckard]

The waypoint based narrative detailed in this post is worth mentioning.

I don't think the author of this has much experience with CRPG tools, just tools used in visual novels/walking simulators. What she's essentially describing is already implemented in branching dialogue trees that loop back to earlier in the conversation.

You could of course represent something like this as a hardcoded node graph, but it's inefficient and error-prone for a narrative designer to wire up all possible dialogue paths for all possible goal states. The pathfinding approach takes control over a part of NPC decision-making, allowing the narrative designer to create a much simpler node graph by defining only the possibility space of outcomes, and not the conditions leading to each outcome. The greater the number of connections between nodes, the more designer-facing complexity you save by automating the decision logic.

If this doesn't seem useful, then remember that most narrative designers are writers, and not logicians. In practice, this means they have to limit the complexity of their branching logic so they (and other writers on the team) can understand it. This results in games with tons of text but little reactivity, even if the game system supports it.

 

[Saerain]

Wiz8 is fucking stupid. Having to click 500 words and combine them with 500 other words, fuck dat shit. The only solution is to have an AI that can communicate with people. There already are a few good ones that you could never tell are a robot. Get an open source version of that and every game will be less crap.

You can use the technologies of cleverbot and autocorrect to make an organic dialogue system where you type your responses yourself.

Time consuming for the sheer quantity of writing required, however. You could only have maybe 2-3x as many characters as you have writers without surpassing Star Citizen's development time. But that's not to say an RPG with an extremely limited cast couldn't be good.

 

[anvi]

You all should buy sex dolls and talk to them.

 

[JarlFrank]

Dialogue trees and keywords are essentially the same thing from a technical perspective. They both work with nodes.

Pick option X in a tree -> get response X
Type out keyword X -> get response X

It's still the same principle of a certain player input corresponding to a certain NPC response.

 

[V_K]

It's still the same principle of a certain player input corresponding to a certain NPC response.

This describes every single action a player can undertake in an RPG. And not only in an RPG.

 

[anvi]

The problem isn't the tech, the problem is all the stories and dialogue is always shit.

 

[Bad Sector]

Morrowind adapted the traditional keyword-based dialogue system into a hypertext dialogue system:

I'm certain it isn't hypertext but just highlights words in the text it can recognize as it sometimes fails and creates weird "links".

Personally of all the systems i've seen i like Morrowind's best (and i sort of see it as a continuation of Ultima-style keyword-based conversation, especially as seen in later Ultimas) but i think the actual text is too "encyclopaedia-y". Most of the common responses (e.g. Ebonheart shown above) do not look like as if someone is speaking to you but as if you are reading a term definition. Having common responses is not a bad idea, but they should be more discussion-like and have variations for different character personalities. But overall i prefer the idea of choosing a *topic* to talk about and having new topics appear as you go, as opposed to prewritten sentences most dialog systems have.

Also i'd really liked it if the game remembers which topics you have already discussed with someone that will give you responses you have already read and use a different color for those (yeah, like visited wikipedia links having different color, i know i know). It doesn't make much sense logically to "know" if the character has anything to say about a topic, but with a long list of topics it can be useful to avoid repetition (like how in New Vegas you get the [empty] suffix in a container before even opening it so that you do not waste time opening and closing it).