Conversation Demonstration

[Paul Stevens]

Here is a little demonstration that I created
back in 2002. It is a simple example of
Ultima-like conversations. You ask the
folks you meet their name, job, or their
favorite hobby. They reply with information
you need to complete the game.

Hello.
Hello.

Name
My name is Julius.

Job
I am a carpenter. I build furniture.

carpenter
Yes....like my saviour.

Furniture
Yes. Like the one that Ralph has. Ask him about his chair.
======= You find Ralph ======

Hello
Hello.

Chair
Oh, you heard about it??? Yes, it is made of teakwood
form the Sherwood Forest. I got the wood from Sam.
He enjoys cutting teakwood.

========= You find Sam
Hello
hello

teakwood
etc, etc, etc, etc


http://dianneandpaul.net/UAF

demo567.dsn.zip

Unpack the archive into a folder
somewhere and double-click on the
executable 'UAFwin.exe'.

Remember that this is 8 years old
and uses a very old version of
DungeonCraft. Look at 'Talk.txt' to see
how it is accomplished.

[Dinonykos]

I have so far only looked at the talk.txt file, but this looks indeed interesting!
I think whether this approach of handling dialogs is useful or not is really depending on how much keywords the NPCs understand. As long as they only react to 1-4 words, I would prefer to handle the dialog with question lists, because otherwise, it would be really frustrating for the player to try around with dozends of words and not getting any reaction.
However, in case the NPCs react to several words and -even better - react to different combinations of words (this is appearantly also done in this demo), then I would like such a dialog very much.

[Uatu]

Oo, dialogs that you actually type? This sounds great - the game that I enjoyed the most with respect to conversations was Ultima VI, back in the day - lots of fun (not like the very stale townspeople who say the same thing whenever you talk to them in other CRPGs).

I will have to try this out!

[Paul Stevens]

Question lists work very differently.
If you use a question list, you are
provided the possible answers.

Using the 'Talk.txt. method, you
must visit other parts of the world
to get the proper questions. Like
who in their right mind would guess
'Teakwood"'???? You must first visit
Ralph, who gives you the clue to ask
Sam about teakwood. And, you may
later discover that Sam has other
information that he will divulge if you
ask him about the Amazon River.

The way I used this capability in my
demo, each of these words was like
a 'Key' to a door. You would not
expect to find the key at the door.
But sometimes a
person gets tired of finding and using
skeleton, square, round, winged, etc.
keys. It seems more intimate to get
knowledge via conversations.
Ultima did a lot of this to good
advantage, in my opinion.

[manikus]

I'm going to fool around with this today if I get a chance. (If there is one thing I'm good at doing, it's anything that involves the word 'fool' or one of it's derivatives.)

I'm also commenting in this thread at the FRUA community site, but will post anything significant here as well. 'Cause we all know I like to talk, er, type.

[Dinonykos]

Originally Posted by Paul Stevens Question lists work very differently. If you use a question list, you are provided the possible answers. The way I used this capability in my demo, each of these words was like a 'Key' to a door. You would not expect to find the key at the door.

I absolutely see your point, what I wanted to say was, however, that the NPCs you talk to should have more to say than only an answer to one keyword. This would degrade them to a kind of password checkpoint... I admit the question list is a different thing...

[Paul Stevens]

Originally Posted by Dinonykos that the NPCs you talk to should have more to say

Quite! And as the first person you meet says,
"Limited only by size of swapfile". Or your
imagination. The NPCs can give you all sorts
of useless information. A clever writer could slip
the 'keywords' into a conversation rather
unobtrusively. I contain some cleverness myself,
but it is of a rather different (and perhaps
useless) kind.

This capability and demo were built without any
input from designers. It is flexible and new
features can be added as needed. Some
built-in pattern-matching capability might be
nice, for example. Like finding two words or
multiple words in arbitrary order. The regular
expressions for such things are yukky.

[manikus]

I've just finished some beta, er alpha testing and am looking at this next.

Edited to add (a couple of hours later)
I played with it, got very excited and decided I wanted to make my own, but it does not compile. I started by truing to compile just the talk.txt that come with GPDL and it does not work. I am using the version that came with .914, which I think has been the same for a while, but I don't know how long.

I've been a bit more explicit in the other thread (linked to above).

[Dinonykos]

So, how does this work theoretically? You write the talk.txt file (like the one included in the demo) and than have to compile it outside the editor? And in text events, you refer to the dialogs a.s.o. in the compiled talk file?

[manikus]

Originally Posted by Dinonykos So, how does this work theoretically? You write the talk.txt file (like the one included in the demo) and than have to compile it outside the editor? And in text events, you refer to the dialogs a.s.o. in the compiled talk file?

Assuming that "a.s.o." means something to the effect of the public function's name, that is correct.

And it does work. If you use the talk.bin file with the latest release of the DC engine it works just fine. It's the compiling of new .bin files I'm having issues with, but if you were to get an old version of DC, you could compile.

In the FRUA froum, Paul has mentioned that he will start looking into this in a couple of days as soon as he's done with the mysterious 'Dungeon Craft AlphaRelease002' proect. and let me just say, I'll gladly wait.

Plus, we can start writing our talk.txt (or whatever.txt) files now. They can be called anything you want, actually, but the .bin file must be talk.bin.