Plugin Request: Dialogue Logger (or something?)

[jannar85]

Hello,
I'm requesting this type of plugin, because it's fun to get to read the "manuscript" from how we play it, and/or being able to go to a special place in the menu, to read things we've missed. We can see this being used in Grim Fandango, and I think it was added in the CMI demo as well.

Ah well, that was worth my 50$ on forum bandwidth wasting...
Sorry Chris

[DragonRose]

This was discussed a while ago. I tried to find the post because I think someone figured out how to do it, but it seems the topic has been eaten by cyberspace :-(

Since I can't remember how this was done, I'd also really like to see this plugin, if any of you clever coders out there would like to make one *flutters eyelashes*

[fjeronimo]

I haven't read the previous post you mentionned, but if I understand correctly, you would want to store all dialog contents and then retrieve and display them at will during gameplay. In other words, a dialog history, which could also be sorted by character, by key plot elements or by whatever sorting factor.

Something widely used in RPG games (a recent example is 'The temple of elemental evil') and more rarely in adventure games.  Is that so?

Well, it sounds like a nice idea and it shouldn't be too hard to implement, although to make it truly powerful and user-customizable it might take some time. Currently, I have a few other projects in hand (including a couple of AGS plugins), but I might give it a go later if nobody has picked it up by then...

fjeronimo

[Pumaman]

The AGS Plugin Interface would probably need an update to enable this, as there's currently no way to intercept speech display. I'll add it to my list.

[fjeronimo]

Yes, that would be quite interesting Chris. I might even have a few other plugin ideas that might use such an interface feature.

fjeronimo

[DragonRose]

I found some notes I made about it, though not the actual thread.  It involved printing messages to a text file whenever the PC performed an action.  This wasn't just for text, but more of a log for every action.  I tend to use the interaction editor for most things, so I don't know much about scripting, but this was what was figured out

In pidgin script:

LOOK at DOOR
displaymessage "You don't know where that door leads."
print to file "George looked nervously at the door. He had no idea where it lead."

USE DOOR
movecharacter to room 2
print to file "George opened the door and moved on to room 2."

The displayed message or interaction has nothing to do with what actually appears in the file.  They're two seperate things according to the script, they just happen at the same time.

Bonus of being able to have more descriptions, making it more like a novel than just a straight log.  Minus of having to write everything out twice.  Hope that's helpful to anyone trying to make the plug-in.

[fjeronimo]

Actually, Dragonrose, I think that the Log writer plugin I just released can do exactly that.

For instance, in the examples you provided, you could have:

LOOK at DOOR:

log(LOG_LEVEL_INFO, "%s looked nervously at the door. He had no idea where it lead", avatarName);

USE DOOR:
log(LOG_LEVEL_INFO, "%s opened the door and moved to room %d", avatarName, roomID);

where avatarName is a variable holding the main character's name and
roomID a variable holding the id of the room where the door leads.

Check the following thread (http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=9606) for more details.

Of course, logging dialog events is a different thing altogether and as Chris pointed out, it would require a few changes to the plugin interface.

[DragonRose]

Oh, I didn't realize there was that much of a difference between the dialogue scripts and regular scripts.  As I said I'm not much of a scripter. But thanks for the info about your plugin!

[After]

set-globalint and run-script could be used to signal dialogue events and specify what you want to output for them.