POLL : Dialogues in your game

Hi everybody!

So I was working on my dialogue tool (advanced editor with dedicated player), and I realized I had no idea of how you guyz handled dialogues in your games. I'm kind of curious, so here is a little poll !

1. I don't need to manage my dialogue. I only have a few text along my game.
2. Directly in my eventsheets
3. I use external files
4. I use third party plugin
5. Other

Thanks and good luck for your projects!

I started using construct half a year ago and while looking how to implement a dialogue system I found this:

https://www.scirra.com/arcade/other-games/dialogue-box-for-lazy-people-8915

But I have modified some stuff to make it more flexible for example commands with a start and an end to create animated text on selected words or sentences. It's all based on a xml file so it's easy to change or translate. But I've read people saying that they have used arrays to manage their dialogues.

It's a Harvest moon kind of game with more RPG elements, but revolves a lot around the characters and the conversations with branched dialogues, etc.

xml and the likes are the way to go in my opinion if you have a dialogue heavy driven game. You can manage what line is been displayed, add extra information into file to add: commands, activate cutscenes, etc. I don't think it's that hard to learn, I started half a year ago as I said and I started from zero with no previous knowledge of any: Regex, Tokenat, xml,arrays, etc. But I got there studying the "Dialogue of Lazy People capx" and I think it's the best way to tackle the task or at least the best one I know of. And once you learn it you will appreciate having developed the system for its flexibility even if it's for a small game with some dialogues, I think it's still worth it. And if you want to make another game you can reuse the whole system instead of placing manually every dialogue like you would had otherwise.

xml and the likes are the way to go in my opinion if you have a dialogue heavy driven game.

I agree with that. What I was pointing out is that working on raw code is not really optimized. The file is of course linear, not adapted to branched dialogues. You need to reload it at any change. And even if you do get used to write code fast, it still is a long time work. As I said above, I'm precisely working on this currently with my own dialogue system : A dedicated editor, with a user friendly interface, that gives you a ready-to-use file.

Magistross dialogue system is a good example of that, and I think that is the best solution.