Where to put the interaction collider?

[nicmar]

Hi Tony, we spoke about this on email earlier, but I noticed something new regarding the collider placement.

My Player is setup like this to make it simple:

Player
+- Dialogue Actor (The component, on a child gameobject)
+- Points (Different child objects, with points for attachments, etc)

I have a collider with a tag, PlayerInteractions, that is required for all Dialogue System Triggers that the player should trigger. I can put the collider as a child to any of the two child objects above.

I have two Triggers with Actor not specified:
A) Conversation with a NPC not in the scene. Player speaks in a bubble, NPC speaks in the Standard UI.
B) Bark with Source=Text, where I want the Player to bark a line of text, without creating a conversation for it.

The placement of the collider gives different results regarding who speaks:

Collider as a child of DIalogue Actor
A) The player overrides the conversation, and speaks the NPC's lines and the opposite.- INCORRECT
B) The player speaks - CORRECT, (since the collider is a child of the Actor i believe).

Collider as a child of Points
A) The NPC and player each speak their own lines - CORRECT
B) A random (?) NPC Actor gets assigned and does the barking. - INCORRECT

So as you can see, none of the solutions above is perfect.

I can specify an Actor for any NPC that is in the scene, but my player is spawned into the scene, so I don't have a reference to it, that I can assign. And the "NPC not in the scene" can't be assigned either.

So can I override the behaviour somehow, so an empty Dialogue Actor assigns the Actor from the conversation, and in case of a bark, assigns the player, if none is assigned?

I understand and appreciate the ability to reuse conversations for multiple actors, but it would be great if it would assign the player normally.

I'm sure you have some great workaround that solves all this, or if I should maybe make a script to assign the player to empty actor slots on spawn or something like that.

Thank you!

[Tony Li]

Hi,

Can you move the Dialogue Actor component to the player's main GameObject? Conversations will look for the Dialogue Actor component on the collider GameObject, then its children, then its parents.

[nicmar]

Sure, but wouldn't that give the same results as Collider as a child of Dialogue Actor?
Since it seems to find it, since the parent is the gameobject with the dialogue actor, or do you mean it would give a different result?

[Tony Li]

I think you're right. I misunderstood your setup.

Can you send me a reproduction example?

This test works for me:

1. In DemoScene1, moved the player's collider and Dialogue Actor to a child GameObject.

2. Set up a trigger to start a conversation. Chose the Sergeant Graves conversation, since Sergeant Graves is not in DemoScene1.

It reports the following, which it correct:

Dialogue System: Starting conversation 'Sergeant Graves', actor=PlayerDialogueActor (UnityEngine.Transform), conversant=ConversationTrigger (UnityEngine.Transform).

And it shows the correct portrait names in the conversation (Sergeant Graves and Player).