Conversation Actor and Conversant; What to set them to?

[tylerwsavatronix]

Hey Toni,

I was curious as to what the general guidelines for setting the "Actor" and "Conversant" on the conversation itself should generally be.

I know on dialogue nodes, Actor is the object talking, and Conversant is the gameobject being talked to, and I would assume a conversation's should be set similar (though a conversation can have more than one person). I myself have been setting the Actor to whomever is going to be the first object to talk, and the conversant to the player (cause that's almost always a main conversant...though in the near future there'll be NPCs talking to each other without the player being part of the conversation).

Looking at the docs and videos for setting up a conversation though, it seems you always have Player be the Actor and the Conversant set to the NPC, so this spiked my curiosity as to whether that should be the guideline, and if so why.

Thanks much!

[Tony Li]

Hi Tyler,

There are no strict requirements. Setting the Player to be the Actor is just an arbitrary convention I use in my own conversations to impose some consistency. It's also what Chat Mapper does by default. Of course, if the conversation occurs only between NPCs, such as an ambient conversation that the player can eavesdrop on during gameplay, the player won't be assigned to either the Actor or the Conversant.

[tylerwsavatronix]

Thanks much!

We are going to be picking up chatmapper soon, as trying to manage dialogue from writers via excel is kind of a major PITA, heh.

Do you happen to know if ChatMapper supports extra fields on a conversation?

In DS I added a boolean for "IsEventDialogue" (dialogue which will only ever be triggered by script) so I can round up only dialogue that isn't event based to fire off when an NPC is interacted with.

Want to make sure I'm going down a good road and not something that's going to require manually editing every conversation when we import from chatmapper in the future.

[Tony Li]

Yes, Chat Mapper supports extra fields in all assets. When migrating your content to Chat Mapper (if you decide to do that instead of rewriting the content from scratch), make sure to read these instructions. There's a one-time setup step.

If your team is currently pulling in less than $50,000 USD in revenue, the Indie Developer version is totally sufficient and is much cheaper than the Commercial version. (Although I'm sure the developer certainly wouldn't complain if you wanted to shell out for the Commercial version.) The Indie purchase link is kind of tucked away under the comparison matrix for Trial | Commercial | Team.

[tylerwsavatronix]

Yeah, we were scoping out the indie version (we've got 0 current revenue, making our first game). We've pretty much made the decision to use it, just need to find a new writer as our last one had some life issues and had to attend to those.

[dabu10]

Hi Tony,

I'm working on the NPCs talking to each other and searching for the definition. Then I found this post. My issue is, that I cannot set the actor and the conversant in the conversation panel, otherwise, all my nodes can only display on the default NPC panel.

Let me make it clear, I'm creating a conversation between npc1 and npc0. In the conversation panel within the database, I have to set the basic actor(npc1):
if I set the conversant to none, and all nodes are normally set, all work well.
But if I set the conversant to npc2, all dialogues would be on the default panel.

So I'm a little bit confused by the definition... I hope you can help me with this.

[Tony Li]

Hi,

For the most thorough explanation, please see: Character GameObject Assignments.

I recommend adding a Dialogue Actor component to each NPC's GameObject. If an NPC doesn't have a GameObject, you can create an empty GameObject for it. Then set the Dialogue Actor's Actor field, and set Dialogue UI Settings > Subtitle Panel Number to the subtitle panel you want that NPC to use.