how do i do Diablo II style conversations with npc's
I don't know what is Diablo II style conversation with npc's, but I suppose you could do it with DisplaySpeech or DisplaySpeechBackgound & AnimateCharacter
Well...I've played Diablo 1 and the dialouge style is pretty similar to the default AGS one.
It may take a bit of nifty GUI scripting to do Shop screens and such.
a) create a TEXT WINDOW GUI.
b) draw a nice box and make it the background pics for this gui
c) make the scren coords so that the gui is displayed centered on the screen
d) in general settings choose dioalog options on gui X (X being your new gui)
e) create the dialogues and display them in the gui. for things like gossip you could use the dialog_request and have some random stuff called from there
should work fine ;)