Editorial Vince and Gareth talk about talking

[JarlFrank]

Tags: Vault Dweller

Vince D. Weller and Gareth Fouche [the guy who is known as Naked Ninja in the Codex and who works on the indie game Scars of War] wrote a <A HREF="http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php?topic=414">nice not-so-little article about dialogue systems in RPGs.</A>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>But again there arose a problem. For now that characters in the world could speak to the player, the player expected to be able to talk back to them. As game worlds had become ever more expansive, important questions had arisen. Questions such as "Which way to the weapon shop, I need to sell all these spare swords I found lying around.", "Have you seen 15 large men and a hat anywhere around here?" and "Which way to the bad guy's super-secret fortress?" These were the burning questions that players desired to ask, but the simple "Please fetch my cat from the tree: Yes/No" lively banter of the time didn't support such deep conversation. So, taking a page from the adventure game genre, which at the time was still alive and kicking instead of a comatose husk, RPG designers introduced the concept of asking NPCs for information on Keywords. Now the player could collect Keywords just as they collected shiny baubles, and ask the characters they met about them.</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
It has some nice screenshots from different games showing different dialogue systems. They mention Fallout, Wizardry 8 and others and show the good and the bad things of each dialogue system.
<br>
<br>
As always, it's a good read and really informative. If you like all the other articles by VD, you'll like this one too.
<br>
<br>
<br>
Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum">Vault Dweller's place for trigger happy intellectuals with a degree in game design</A>

 

[elander_]

Good reading. I have to say dialog was never the strong point for Daggerfall, but the quest system and the procedural quests which added and removed dialog topics dynamically made it look more interesting than the usual wiki Morrowind system.

Here's how it works with Daggerfall. Once the player accepts a procedural quest a data record for that quest is created from a quest template with random values initialized in place and a finishing time if there is one. When the player finishes this quest it's data record is removed from memory and all resources (npcs, items, dialog topics, timers, journal entries) allocated for that quest are removed from the game (automatic resource collection). All those empty houses and tons of dungeons can be picked by a quest randomly.

For example if you pick a quest to get rid of a rogue wizard in Daggerfall capital city the game will allocate an unused dungeon in the same province and put a wizard class npc in that dungeon at a random location. Allocating a resource for a quest is very fast and easy. You just say put an npc of class X anywhere in place Y. To give him a generic item just create an item or N to M items of type X (for example an holy relic) and put them in place Y or give them to the npc.

The game will also add dialog topics for the people in the same city, the mages guild questor and the wizard to dispose. These dialog topics vary for different conditions when the quest is started, the player ask about the wizard background, the place where he is, the quest was failed or succeeded and other things. These topics appear on the news or when asking about people or places. Adding dialog topics dynamically is also very easy. Just use a command to add a text resource to npc X when asking for news, people or places. It is remove automatically when the quest finishes unless you use another command to make it permanent.

This is cool because it gives the player the sensation that npcs are alive and interesting in what the player is doing - it gives an audience to the player that offers feedback to his performance and comments on how his actions have affected his reputation with the other factions. It's also possible that when picking up some dialog lines others are automatically added to npcs. This makes those interesting Daggerfall investigation quests. Unfortunately there was no way to check skills to decide which dialog lines to give or to create unique npcs, give them a name and specific dialog topics for that unique npc, only to unique npcs that already exist. For this Daggerfall was a bit limited.

By the way the template compiler that was used to edit Daggerfall quests doesn't work anymore on windows xp, but the quest source can be found here in Donald Tipton links.
http://andux.svatopluk.com/

 

[Naked Ninja]

Exactly. While the implementation in Daggerfall was far from perfect, it holds the seeds of great potential, imo.

 

[Hory]

I haven't played a lot of Morrowind, but I know it has a dialogue system quite close to what can be considered "the best from all worlds", at least in theory.

I favour this kind of system where the user is presented with tree-like choices, but only related to a certain topic, whichhe must specify (and think of) himself. However, this also requires the largest quantity of writing, especially for avoiding "I don't know about [that]" responses.

Additionally, if the designer wants to avoid the user having to guess all the topics, they could be gathered in a list as the player learns more about the story (like in Syberia too). But this way, you're back to the problem (which also exists in traditional tree-systems) of the user compulsively clicking each possible choice so that nothing is missed.

Rorschach tries to go around this by having a limited "inventory" of possible topics, making topic management one of the main gameplay elements. But this seems (and is) artificial, and it just leads eventually to a lot of going back and forward in order to get/use additional topics.

Both Rorschach and Morrowind specifically highlight topics, wiki-style.

 

[Zomg]

Keyword engines are more powerful than dialog trees the way voxels are more powerful than polygon graphics.

 

[elander_]

Dialog has more about it than if it is keyword or tree based. I would advise you to play more games and see what they have done in the past. There's a ton of interesting dialog ideas and variations out there.

Dialog may work with both sides with npcs puting questions or making statements themselves on their own initiative. You may have a choice to chose your conversing posture among friendly, submissive or agressive for example. Or a menu that let's you pick up some info you gathered in your travels and tell it to another npc to try to influence his behavior.

Starflight, Protostar, Star Control 2 had a dialog system like this.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/starflight
http://www.mobygames.com/game/protostar ... e-frontier
http://www.mobygames.com/game/star-control-ii

Both Star Control 2 and Protostar were made with the help of Starflight developers.

The much hated Neverwinter Nights had a very interesting dialog system that was wasted in that game. You could talk with more than two npcs at the same time and the game would not stop while you were conversing. It happened to me in a tavern with a german accent warrior inside a tavern and two male young warriors by her side, when i tried to seduce her and then one of them got in the middle of the conversation.

I also remenber vaguely about a game called B.A.T. i played on my old Commodore Amiga and some text based adventures like The Hound of Shadow.


However much of this doesn't change the fact that you will always be limited to how much text you will have in a game and this will always limit the amount of dialog states for each character. In Daggerfall characters share dialog topics within different factions. For example lady Briziena shares dialog lines with the common people, with their unique character and with each quest she is associated. I suppose this helps a little in reducing the work done to create characters but in the end you have to think what to do with, say 500 dialog states and a 500 page book worth of text and how many characters will receive that text (both unique and generic) and you have to make sure that you can give that impression to the player is free to make their own choices and that those choices are important even when they are very selective.