Quest Text Content Templates?

[ccfeet]

Hi!

Is it somehow possible to create "templates" for quest text content? Meaning a specific set of Headings, Body Text and Buttons. I end up using the same content in a lot of different parts. Like the Offer Text is often the same as Journal Text. But manually copying them leads to errors a lot.

Script that auto fills Journal Text from Offer Text would also be helpful.

[Tony Li]

Hi,

That's a great idea. Currently there are two places where you can re-use text:

1. If you add Heading Text, you can tick Use Quest Title to use the value that you've entered for the quest's title.

2. The Journal UI has a Show Dialogue Content If No Journal Content checkbox. If you leave a quest's journal content entirely empty, the Journal UI will show the current dialogue text instead.

Instead of a feature that copies Offer Text to Journal Text, I think it might be useful to be able to link one to the other, so that if you make changes to Offer Text, the linked Journal Text will automatically reflect the change.

I'm totally open to user feedback on this. Would that be more helpful, or would it be better to simply copy the text so you can customize it for the journal? What other areas would be helpful to allow copy-paste or linking?

One concern about linking is that it would be possible to create an infinite loop where, say, the offer text links to the journal text, and the journal text links to the offer text, so it can't resolve itself. If I add linking, it will probably only allow one level of linking.

[ccfeet]

Show Dialogue Content If No Journal Content almost does what I wanted! Except I can't add quest step descriptions like "Kill 5 orcs".

I think the nicest implementation would be a "Link" content type. Like when you're editing quest step and select Journal Text little plus icon dropdown, there would be a "Link" type. When you use that you could choose from which step and which content to link from. Or something like that. Then you could also add more stuff specific to that quest step.

Offer text would be like:
Heading: "Orc Slayer"
Body: "The orcs are a menace, go kill them!".

Then if you go to the Kill Orcs quest step, you could make your journal content like so:
Link: Offer Text
Heading: "Tasks"
Body: "Kill 5 orcs"

The only problem I could think of with this would be that I'd also like to have a rewards section in the offer text. But then in the quest step I would want "Task" texts be above the rewards...

So if it would be possible to also add couple of text content areas in the main Quest Info section. Like "Quest Description" and "Quest Rewards". Then you could add separate content into those two and link them where ever with the Link content.

[Tony Li]

What if the link were to a single piece of content?

If the Offer Text is:
Heading: "Orc Slayer"
Body: "The orcs are a menace, go kill them!".
Heading(2): "Rewards"
Icon: 5 gold

Then the Journal Text could be:
Link: Offer Text - Heading ("Orc Slayer")
Link: Offer Text - Body ("The orcs are a menace, go kill them!".)
Heading: "Tasks"
Body: "Kill 5 orcs"
Link: Offer Text - Heading(2) ("Rewards")
Link: Offer Text - Icon ("5 gold")

It's not as compact, but it gives you full control over what gets linked and where.

And the rule to prevent recursive links would be simple: you can't link to another link.

[ccfeet]

That's sounds good also!

I mean for text fields it's not much different from copy pasteing (except saves a few clicks), but for icons and buttons it eliminates a lot of errors that could happen from manually mirroring them.

[Tony Li]

Another advantage over copy-pasting is that if you change the original text the links will also reflect the change. I'll try to get this into the next update.

[ccfeet]

Ahh yeah that one too. Thank you! Hopefully it'll make it to next release.