Hey,
I hope it's okay to open a new thread for this idea, but maybe this is worth discussing :)
I've recently played Broken Sword and in this game you can ask everyone about every inventory item (some goes for Phoenix Wright on DS btw). This makes dialog puzzles a lot harder and in my oppinion more interesting.
Doing the same thing in AGS is a little awkward, so how about this:
(http://shatten.sonores.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/dialog_mock.png)
Having inventory items linked to the dialog editor would make it possible to easily broaden dialogs. As of today, it's way too much work to add a topic for each inv items + checking if it's still being carried.
What do you think? Is there a slight chance to see it in a near future :) ?
Yeah, that could be a pretty useful option! Saves on having to drag items out the inventory and onto the NPC's all the time.
btw what are those (d667,666) things in your dialogs?
Quotebtw what are those (d667,666) things in your dialogs?
These infos are used by the custom dialog module in order to show icons in addition to the text.
667 is the normal sprite slot, 666 is the highlighted and "d" means that it's a dialog topic, not an inventory topic.
This is quite a specialized request, so I can't promise it'll feature in AGS any time soon.
Would anyone else use something like this?
If it was offered, I'd definitely consider it as a design option. As of now, I'm content with using items on the characters to prompt speech.
I shall start an PR campaign instantly.
Boys and Girls - believe me, you WANT this feature ;D
Quote from: abstauber on Wed 28/10/2009 11:54:14
I shall start an PR campaign instantly.
Boys and Girls - believe me, you WANT this feature ;D
It's not that I want it but I'd use it if it was there.
But wouldn't it be possible to do all that with an editor plugin?
Personally, I think this is a great idea!
I would definatly use it if it was a part of the editor :)
I would really like use this...very good idea!
This is definitely a great idea. Lots of games have dialog options to ask about inventory items. The Tex Murphy games come to mind immediately.
Using an item on a character, to me, indicates that you want to give it to them. Asking them about it should be a dialog option. There, a logical reason why this should be implemented. :)
The long term AGS Game I'm currently working on(and have been for a while) is mainly based around nice uses of dialogue.
So, Yes, I can see this being helpful, useful and used. ;)
I agree with CJ, and not only because it's specialized. It would be quite easy to add topics to your list of topics easily by using SetOptionState when picking the item up. For your suggestion to work, CJ would have to adjust the dialog script so it knew when you had the item in question, but with this it's absolutely trivial to just directly address the dialogs in question and set the topic to on when the item is collected. This also allows you to turn off the topic when the item is given away (which you could also simplify with a function that checks if you have that inventory item).
In fact, you could do all of this with one function that checks if you have the item (at which point you add the topic to certain dialogs you think are important to discuss the item) and if you do not have the item it checks those topics to see if they are on, and if so, disables them.
Well, you forget about several facts:
You can't sort dialog topics
and you can only delete the last topic.
Now what happens if you have, let's say 18 dialogs and your game is almost finished. Now you decide to add one more inventory item - maybe a watch.
You would have to change all 18 dialogs, copy and paste all topics to get them in the right order and alter that gigantic if-condition.
Sure it's possible - but it's far away from being easy.
Your argumentation sounds like: "Why do we need GUIs? We already have overlays" ;)
I do see where this would be useful. However, considering the other things on my to-do list, it probably won't make an appearance in the near future.