what are the best external compatible asset for managing dialogues ?

[Strook]

Hello everyone ! I love using Dialogue system, i have still a lot to learn, but its incredible how many feature are in there. I find myself creating something for my game (Save system, scene management, etc) and always find out that something already exists within the dialogue system plugin...which is amazing

I was wondering how do you folks handle writing the actual dialogue ? For now i am using the built in dialogue editor, but i wonder if Its recommended to use something else ? (I never used any but i see a lot of recurring names like ICyDraft, YarnSpinner, etc)

Do you think its possible to make an entire game strictly using the built-in dialogue editor ?

Thanks !

[Tony Li]

Hi,

Most of the 100+ games published with the Dialogue System use the built-in editor. It has the best integration with Dialogue System features, such as being able to drag assets into the Sequence field, set up scene-based UnityEvents in the inspector, etc., that external editors can't do.

Some external editors that are popular to use with the Dialogue System are articy:draft (paid), Chat Mapper (paid), and Twine (free). Yarn is a lot like Twine. There isn't a Yarn importer, but there's a Twine importer. Ink is also popular, but it works differently from the Dialogue System, so it's a little more challenging to set up the integration. The list of importers is on the Import & Export page. There is also a JLC Converter download on the Extras page. This is the tool that Mografi used to write their dialogue for Jenny LeClue - Detectivu.

[digiwombat]

As a person who built an entire open-source external tool to manage Dialogue System databases, I can resolutely say that it's much better to work with the built-in editor.

The problem with an external tool is that you become very disconnected from your other game logic and data. It will make your workflow slower and you will find yourself going back and forth between the Unity editor to verify this thing or that thing about the state of the game and what needs to go where and what is named which way.

The mental energy from that context switching is higher than you'd imagine, I think. And at present, the UI and organization are all pretty good. There could definitely be some improvements (auto-arrange makes a mess, pagination for variable lists) but once you get a workflow in place for keeping your conversations organized, it's the best way to work, hands down.

AND, the ability to use slashes to organize the dropdown menus is indispensable for large databases.

[Strook]

thank you for the replies ! i will stick to the default editor for now, it working fine for me !