While the old Sierra games were mainly based on action and not talking, the Lucasarts games took the opposite approach.

If you want to create a game with conversations where the player can choose from a list of optional topics to talk about, you can now with the new Dialog Editor. Go to the "Dialogs" node.

Conversations are made up of Topics. A "topic" is a list of choices from which the player can choose. You may have up to 30 choices in a topic. However, not all of them need to be available to the player at the start of the game - you can enable various options for conversation once the player has said or done other things. For example, when you talk to the man in the demo game, the first option is just "Hi". Once he has said this, however, a new option becomes available.

The Dialog Editor is quite self-explanatory. Double-click a dialog topic to open up its window. You'll see the list of options for the topic on the left, and the dialog script on the right. Each option has a couple of checkboxes to its right:

• The "Show" column specifies whether that option is available to the player at the start of the game.
• The "Say" column defines whether the character says the option when the player clicks it. The default is on, but if you want options describing the player's actions rather than the actual words, you may want to turn this column off for that dialog.

You control what happens when the player chooses an option by editing the script on the right. This is called the dialog script, and is a simplified version of scripting streamlined for conversations.

With a newly created dialog topic, all you will see in the script is a number of lines starting with an '@' symbol. In the dialog script, these signify the starting points of the script for each option. For example, when the player clicks on option 3, the script will begin on the line following "@3". There is also a special starting point, called "@S". This is run when the conversation starts, before any choices are given to the player. This could be used to display a "Hello" message or something similar.

To display some speech, you begin the line with the character's SCRIPT NAME (not full name), followed by a colon, then a space, and then what you want them to say. For example, if my main character's script name is EGO, I would write

ego: "I am very happy today because it's my birthday."

IMPORTANT: Do NOT include the "c" at the start of the character's script name here.

You can also use the special character name "narrator", which displays the text in the pop-up message box instead of as speech text; and the alias "player", which will say it as the current player character - useful if you don't know which character the player will be controlling when they speak the conversation.

If you just use ... as the text for a character to say, the game will pause briefly as if they are stopping to think, and nothing will be displayed.

To signal the end of the script for this option, place a "return" command on the last line of it. For example,

@1
ego: "Hello. How are you?"
narrator: The man looks you in the eye.
otherman: ...
otherman: "I'm fine."
return

NOTE: Do NOT indent these lines with spaces or tabs. Indented lines signify that AGS should interpret the line as a normal scripting command rather than a dialog scripting command.

The dialog commands available are:

• goto-dialog X
  Switches the current topic to Topic X, and displays the current list of choices for that topic.
• goto-previous
  Returns to the previous topic that this one was called from. If the dialog started on this topic, then the dialog will be stopped.
• option-off X
  Turns option X for the current topic off, meaning it won't be displayed in the list of choices next time.
• option-off-forever X
  Turns option X off permanently. It will never again be displayed, not even if an "option-on" command is used.
• option-on X
  Turns option X for the current topic on, including it in the list of choices to the player next time they are displayed.
• return
  Stops the script and returns to the list of choices.
• stop
  Stops the conversation and returns the player to the game.

Using scripting commands in dialogs

Often the provided dialog scripting commands won't be enough for what you want to do in the dialog. You might want to give the player an inventory item or add some points to their score, for example.

AGS now lets you put normal scripting commands in your dialog script, by indenting the line with spaces or tabs. For example:

@1
ego: "Hello. How are you?"
narrator: The man looks you in the eye.
  player.AddInventory(iKey);
  Display("This line is displayed from a normal script command");
otherman: "I'm fine."
return

When working with dialog scripts, the this keyword allows you to access the currently running dialog.

If you want to conditionally break out of the dialog script, the special tokens RUN_DIALOG_GOTO_PREVIOUS, RUN_DIALOG_RETURN and RUN_DIALOG_STOP_DIALOG are available which you can return from inside a script block. For example:

@1
ego: "Hello. How are you?"
narrator: The man looks you in the eye.
  if (player.HasInventory(iKey)) {
    player.Say("Actually, I'd better go.");
    return RUN_DIALOG_STOP_DIALOG;
  }
otherman: "Here's a key for you."
return

Parser input

You'll notice in the dialog editor, the property grid has an option called "ShowTextParser". If you enable this, a text box will be displayed below the predefined options in the game, which allows the player to type in their own input.

If they type in something themselves, then the dialog_request global script function will be run, with its parameter being the dialog topic number that the player was in.

AGS automatically calls ParseText with the text they typed in before it calls dialog_request, so you can use Said() calls to respond. See the text parser section for more info.