Dialogue System 1.7.6 Released

[Tony Li]

Version 1.7.6 has been released! You can download it now from the Pixel Crushers customer download site (PM me your Unity Asset Store invoice number for access), and it should be available on the Unity Asset Store in 5-10 business days.


Version 1.7.6
Core:

• Improved: Added DialogueManager.SetDialogueSystemInput(bool) to enable/disable input to Dialogue System.
• Improved: Continue button only affects conversation that is running through button's dialogue UI.
• Improved: Option to record SimStatus by optional custom field (e.g, "Articy Id").
• Improved: Lua Console hotkey is now configurable.
• Added: Em Tag for Invalid Responses option in Dialogue Manager > Input Settings.
• Fixed: [ConversationPopup] script attribute now handles lists of nested classes.
• Fixed: Variable names containing periods failed to load in saved games.
• Dialogue Editor:
  • Improved: Can now specify location for auto-backup files.
  • Improved: Outgoing links from selected node are now highlighted in yellow.
  • Improved: Added option to show/hide all actor names on nodes.
  • Fixed: Horizontal link arrows were difficult to select with mouse.
  • Fixed: Watches tab wasn't always refreshing to match current list of runtime variables.

Third Party Support

• articy:draft: Fixed edge cases in recursive/cross-linked dialogues.
• Ink: Added support.
• PlayMaker: Added FSMEvent() & Get/SetFsmXXX() Lua functions.
• Realistic FPS Prefab: Fixed bug in saving weapons that have "!" in their name.
• TextMesh Pro: Added support for TextMeshProUGUI in bark UIs.

[hellwalker]

Just a small suggestion/request for next release. Can you move the Another conversation to the top in link to selection? I have crazy large dialogue and had to scrolls a lot of entries to get there

[Tony Li]

Just a small suggestion/request for next release. Can you move the Another conversation to the top in link to selection? I have crazy large dialogue and had to scrolls a lot of entries to get there

Good idea! Will do. I'm trying to get a patch out by the end of next week. I'll include this change in the patch.

BTW, you can organize your conversation titles into submenus using forward slashes. For example, these conversations will be shown in two separate submenus, Friends and Simpsons:

• Friends/Chandler
• Friends/Joey
• Friends/Phoebe
• Friends/Rachel
• Simpsons/Bart
• Simpsons/Homer
• Simpsons/Lisa
• Simpsons/Maggie
• Simpsons/Marge

The one drawback is that Conversation Triggers go by title, since they tend to stay more consistent when importing and exporting to various third party editors such as articy:draft. So if you change a conversation's title you'll need to update your Conversation Triggers.

[hellwalker]

I'm having a problem with Articy draft import. All the characters are assigned wrongly.
I imported same articy file with DS 1.7.5 and everything worked correctly.

[hellwalker]

I think I figured it out, I changed the name of one character and Articy orders characters using alphabet and this must have changed the way DS imports characters. So now Id's mismatch.

[Tony Li]

Articy provides no guarantees about the order in which entities appear in XML, and the importer assigns IDs in the order in which they appear in the XML. Can you go by actor name or "Articy Id" field? These fields are stable.

[hellwalker]

Sorry I could not understand what you mean by

Can you go by actor name or "Articy Id" field? These fields are stable.

[Tony Li]

I might have misunderstood first. Are you saying that the wrong speakers are assigned to dialogue fragments after importing into Unity?

Or are you saying that, in the dialogue database, the actors' IDs have changed, but the correct speakers are still assigned to dialogue fragments?

If the only problem is that the actors' IDs have changed, my recommendation is not to assume that the IDs will stay the same every time you import into Unity. The IDs may change. However, the actors' names should always match their values in articy, and their internal Articy ID values will remain the same as in articy. The Dialogue System's importer saves each entity's Articy ID in a custom text field named "Articy Id".

[hellwalker]

I'm working on a story in Articy and as I finish chapters or update them I import them into DS as a new file and then merge that file to my main DS Database file.

When I opened the new imported DS DB, I was by habit syncing it's actors table to my Main DB actors table so my Actor specific settings would match. This cause names to change in new DB as in new DB characters had different ID's. I thought this was separate bug but then I figured out ID mismatch was causing it.

For now I used a little "Hack", I opened exported XML and manually re-arranged the actors with order that matched my main DB order. This way I was able to merge new and old DB's, as Id's matched.

Though I think it would be good if DS had a way to make sure it imported actor ID's uniformly all the time. (Or Articy had this for export )
As this creates a bit of a problem for work in progress stories like mine.

I think the change could be easy, DS could have a field in importer that allows you to import Actors in different order.

• Export file order
• Articy Technical name Alphabet Ascending
• Articy External ID Alphabet Ascending
• Articy Object ID Alphabet Ascending

This way we could guarantee new and old DB would merge easily.

[Tony Li]

Each of those choices could result in new IDs. For example, if you deleted an actor, all subsequent actors would have a different ID. It might be better to allow you to manually assign IDs to each actor in the importer window. I'll add this to the roadmap.

Have you considered keeping all your data in articy and reimporting the entire database fresh each time?