Best import format for easy editing?

[nicmar]

Hey Tony, I hope everything is well! We haven’t worked on dialogues for a while but we’re soon getting back to it.

I feel the editor is a bit.. wieldy to use, and would like to try using a text editor to write dialogues. As DS supports many different formats I’m wondering if there are examples of what different formats looks like in text and which is the simplest to use in a text editor, when adding branches and such?

Thank you in advance!

[Tony Li]

Hi,

If you want a pure plain-text format, check out Mografi's JLC Converter available on the Extras page. Note that Mografi eventually decided to use the built-in editor for Jenny LeClue. But some other developers use it and seem happy with it. It's the simplest text format, but it still supports Conditions, Scripts, and Sequences since it was written specifically for the Dialogue System.

If you're looking for an outline format, you could use Neverwinter Nights' Aurora Toolset. Its editor looks a bit like this:



(The Dialogue System also has an outline mode, if you simply want to use an outline mode instead of nodes.)

There's also Ink, but research it (and its Dialogue System integration) before choosing that route. Ink works very differently, so the Dialogue System integration is different from the other integrations.

The other import formats all use node-based editors, including articy:draft, Chat Mapper, Twine, and TalkIt.

[nicmar]

Thanks a lot, I will check them out
I like nodes but for some reason it’s a bit sluggish at times, even the Shader graph and other Unity graphs.

[Tony Li]

Sounds good. BTW, if you're using Unity 2019.2 - 2019.3, update to the latest 2019.4.

Version 2019.2 - 2019.3 had a major editor bug that caused a big performance issue with all editors, and it was exponentially worse the bigger the asset was. So a 10 KB animator controller asset would make the Animator window much, much slower than a 1 KB animator controller.

[nicmar]

Thanks for the tip! We’re on 2019.3 but can change. How about 2020.1, shouldnt we jump straight to that?

[Tony Li]

It depends on when you plan to release Space Chef. If you're going to release before next March - June, consider staying with 2019.4 so you can release on a stable LTS version. Unity 2020 probably won't be in LTS until late spring 2021. If you're going to release after next June, give 2020.1 a try. Don't go to 2020.2a yet; Unity still has a lot of bugs to iron out.

[nicmar]

Thanks for your insights! I never try any alpha versions but I guess going LTS is a good idea. I don’t think we will release before summer 2021, how much I would want to

[nicmar]

Hey! I checked the JLC format and really like the simplicity. I can hand it to our writer and he can easily write stuff without having to learn anything Unity.

One thing I don’t get is if there is support to go back in the dialogue tree. Let’s say i have this:

@anchor
Bot: So do you want the red fluffy one or the yellow plastic one?

[red]
Chef: I want the red one
[red]

[yellow]
Chef: I want yellow
[yellow]

[again]
Chef: Can you tell me about the colors again?
(Is there a code to insert here to jump to a named @anchor)
[again]

Note we don’t show the last bubble and also it could be a jump to the start of the tree. Pretty much like monkey island dialogues.

Any clues?

[Tony Li]

I don't think there's currently support to link back to previous entries. Please make a list of feature requests (maybe it's just link-backs), and I'll try to get them implemented as quickly as time allows.

[nicmar]

Aha interesting. I'll test it out and see how it works.
What field would you use for a linkback? Title maybe?

Also +- symbol is very hard to use. I guess I could change it myself in the code, but that character is not available on my iPad as far as i know, and on my mac i have to copy paste it, so maybe there's some other symbol that could be used for scripts instead