how to manage dialogs and quests?

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Edwart
Posts: 46
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2005 12:29 pm

how to manage dialogs and quests?

Post by Edwart »

Hello,

i am creating an adventure game with irrlicht. Everything works fine (movement, collision, level-loading,...).
But at the moment i am at a point where i have to plan the dialogs and quests.

How can i manage dialogs and quests?
Do you have some articels, tutorials?

At the moment i am planing to make a diary.ini for the diary where all stirngs are included. At the logic, what should be shown is in the hard-code of the game.

on a similiar way i wanted to make it with dialogs and quests. strings are in the ini, the logic is in the game.
but, when i want to add new quests or dialogs, i have to change many lines of code, so this plan is not very comfortable.

what experience do you have? any "simple" solution?

Thanx
Edwart
Suvi
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Post by Suvi »

Hi!

Scripting languages are probably what you should consider using. With scripts, you could have the logic outside the game as well.

I have only ever used AngelScript (http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/) which is a bit like C but I guess there are better scripting languages out there like Lua.
JP
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Post by JP »

Yeah i reckon looking into a scripting language may be best, not sure how 'simple' that would be in terms of learning it but it's likely to save you headaches in the long run.

If you really don't want to do that then you could take a look at my RPGExample for IrrAI which has some (laughable) dialog in it :lol:

As for quests... well in my Alestorm game i've not used scripting but i've made a ltitle config app which lets me state what objects are in certain missions, what enemies there are and where they spawn from etc and other things like what audio to play for the mission and so on. Then i load in the config file which then configures the mission before it starts.... though i guess that's probably very much like scripting :lol:
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Edwart
Posts: 46
Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2005 12:29 pm

Post by Edwart »

hello,

thank you for your answers.
what i ment was, how to organize it in files (for example in xmls).

what i thought about is, every dialog and quest to organize in xmls.
every dialog and quest has nodes and options what is possible.

but i am not sure, how to organize the xml to create it generic enough to add new nodes, dialogs and quests easily.

then i need an xml-parser, but that would be the easiest issue, when the structure of the xml is fix and generic.

what do you mean?

thank you
edwart
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