I know this skirts the edge of “too specific” as a block, but having now tried to make a very basic dialogue tree with existing blocks, I’d say that for such a standard element in so many games, it can get quite complex and confusing.
I’m picturing an extended Alert box, but where you can add as many buttons as you like, label them, and then just chain them together however you want, a bit like https://twinery.org/
Think it would be fun to add more life to game characters by letting the player “talk” to some of them more interactively. And since coming up with fun dialogue is itself a process, you don’t want to get stuck constantly debugging the functionality of a simple text box while you do it.
Is there a reason why he’s said he will never do it?
(I’m guessing the alert box relies on the “alert” element that you’d find in most of the platforms flowlab can currently publish to, so leaving it as it is keeps it all stable?)
There’s got to be some other way then of making fully interactive dialogue happen. Will keep trying.
He said that there are other ways to customize, the alert and bar are really just for beginners starting out on flowlab. Several people have made their own text; and people can just create their own button objects for the player to click on.
Here is the best made example:
Right, I looked at that bundle, but as far as I could tell it was about styling the label (changing what it looks like), not generating interactive dialogue where the character asks you something and you have a choice of responses, and they respond differently based on what you just said.
As mentioned above, twinery.org makes this a piece of cake, and it has a very similar format to Flowlab’s IDE.
If I missed something in that bundle and it has that functionality, or if someone else has done this, I want to know!
I guess what I was trying to say is that you can make your own user interface, similar to how PixelPizza made his own Label. Flowlab has the tools to program the logic for something like that;
Get an input, be it a key press or a mouse click
Have object’s in the UI layer be buttons/options
Use text lists, filters, and whatnot to determine the next text to output.
I don’t think Grazer will update the Alert because anything better can be made from scratch.
Basically I’m trying to create a “human readable”, easily editable bundle that then spits out text lists that can be traversed according to a branch address, as pictured in this flowchart.
Anyone who wants to follow along as I muddle along setting up this insanity can keep an eye on this:
(keep in mind that what I’m after is a block where a total noob could open the “human readable” one, change the texts in that tree and have it just work, even if they don’t use all the answers or add extra ones.)
The part that could be set up more elegantly/functionally is something that would take the QA code (question and answer position address, which is made up of what buttons have already been pressed and in what order) and then spit out the correct next set of question + answers accordingly.
One thing this exercise should demonstrate though is that this gets quite complex
To anyone following along, this is what ONE part of this code looks like, the part where you can actually see what the dialogue looks like, and it’s only three levels deep:
And all of the above, if the alert box allowed you to add buttons to each alert and then link those to the next alert, could look more like the pic below instead. I guess I could try next would be to make a version where I create a bundle that recreates the alert function but with a few extras…the problem is, though that then you’d have to open each one up to follow what your dialogue says at each branch. And, of course, the block would have to generate a button for each choice, at each branch…would emit work?
