Howdy gents! I haven't been here in ages. I have been thinking about starting a small game project and I've been having some rad ideas. I am currently on a mac and don't have any kind of Parallels installed and I cannot check this on my own, so I come here to ask.
Would it be possible to create a detective's notebook-style dialogue interface like in Discworld Noirâ€"where all/most conversation options get fed into a notebook, from which any character in the game can be interrogated and upon which the protagonist can him/herself ruminate? When a given puzzle/conversation opens a new line of interrogation, a new line item is added to the notebook, and then this technically becomes a conversation option for all other NPCs in the world.
Last time I played with AGS some half a dozen years ago, I recall that the built-in Lucas-Arts-like dialogue system, robust as it was, was not particularly flexible in this regard. Would this require building a plugin, or would I be able to hack it from within AGS's own scripting system?
Also, I dunno who the admins are, I tried to search for Discworld Noir on the forums and it kept giving me a database error. FYI. Never mind, noticed other threads talking about this. ¬_¬
Yes, it's possible. Two AGS games from Wadjet Eye Games, The Shivah and The Blackwell Legacy, both use (simple) notebook systems.
The easiest way is probably to script the notebook as an inventory (using a dummy "notebook" character), and the options as inventory objects. Then you create the appropriate GUIs and write the dialog as "use inventory object on character" functions.