Search the Community

I know I've made several threads about different features, so I hope I'm not overdoing it. There is one more thing I've been wondering about, which is also relevant to my plans to make TDM maps in the future. I was wondering to what extent TDM can allow dialogues between players and NPC's. Sure, I've seen missions in which an NPC talks toward the player when he gets close, and there are occasionally people conversing about mission related information which you can eavesdrop on. There are however a few points I'm specifically interested in, and how they must be done in scripts or DarkRadiant: - Exchanging sentences between two or more NPC's and / or the player: An NPC talking by itself is pretty easy and obvious. But what about making multiple characters have a conversation... in which each one plays several voice files in order, while waiting for the other to finish and do the same? Further more, what about conversations between an NPC and the player... where the player hears himself talk, then the NPC says his / her sentence, then the player talks again, and so on? I've seen inter-NPC conversations in some TDM missions, but was curious how the mapper must do it. - Choices: This is the part that interests me most. Does scripting currently allow the player to choose how to continue a dialogue, similar to how this is done in some 2D RPG games? What this means is that during an exchange of sentences, the conversation pauses and the player gets a list of options. For example, and NPC can tell the player "Do you want this mission", then the player could either press the 1 key to select "Yes, I'll get to it" or 2 to select "Not now, I'll have to think about it"... of course influencing whether or not he receives a new objective. - Subtitles: Triggering text to show on the screen when an NPC starts talking should be an easy thing. But for subtitles to work, this text must be renewed once the other participant starts to speak, and expire at the appropriate time after the conversation ends. Is this possible to do currently... for dialogues as well as characters idly talking or yelling when they're alerted? - Translations: I noticed that TDM has a system to translate missions to various languages. I wanted to know how much it covers: Can you only translate text found on notes, or also character voices and subtitles (if they exist)? And does the mission need to be edited in DarkRadiant for this, or can people download and select translation packages for any mission individually, which can change text and voice content? That might be tricky if voices aren't calculated in realtime, since it also changes the duration of voice files.

Grayman worked hard adding a great feature for those of us making maps which I'd like to draw your attention to, several path nodes now will trigger their targets, so you can more easily start conversations, have AI comment on their environment, cause a sound to happen, synchronize other AI to move in concert, or activate whatever you can imagine upon reaching/doing these path nodes... This should allow for greater environmental interactivity and dynamics. For example, we often exploit the random targets of path nodes to have AI go different ways or offer different behaviors, to be less predictable to the player, however sometimes they'll repeat the same thing, wasting that work. In recent discussion in another thread, we realized a couple things, a path node could be made to switch, alternating between different destinations, or that random list of destinations could eliminate used routes, to add more variety. (Then when the final one is used, replenish the list.) This also makes randomizing things like loot placement or objective item goals in maps even easier (sans scripting), as you no longer need trigger_once entities, just have an AI target as many path_corners as you want, and have those trigger whatever results should occur from that random outcome, easy-peasy. What other creative implementations come to mind?