Pixel Crushers Forum

Hi Tony,
I bought your asset "Dialogue System" for unity, and I'm totally sold. It's by far my best investment. That's why I have total confidence in your opinion.
I hesitate to buy your other asset : Quest Machine and love/hate.
I could try them, but it might take a little time to implement them correctly in my game....
What I want to do is quite simple in fact, and maybe these assets are overkill. For quests, I just want a quest journal, and a quest manager that is easy to implement. I don't really need Procedurally-generated quests. Therefore, it is true that Dialogue System could be totally appropriate. But if it saves me a few hours of work...

For Love/Hate.... I don't understand how I can use it because I don't really have a very advanced AI. What I would like to do is an affinity score. It will determine the responses of the NPCs. This affinity score could be modulated according to the player's answers, the success or failure of quests and so on. I had the idea to create a variable for each NPC into Dialogue system,
But I wonder if Love/hate wouldn't be more appropriate and if I would gain performance in the long term.

My English is far from perfect, don't hesitate to reformulate if necessary.
Best regards,
Eleusis.

Hi,

Thanks for using the Dialogue System!

Love/Hate and Quest Machine have features that might make life easier, but you can do most things in the Dialogue System alone. The exceptions are procedural quest generation (Quest Machine) and automatically updating affinity based on player actions (Love/Hate).

Love/Hate:
The Dialogue System has basic status & relationship functions. However, you specify them in text in dialogue entries' Conditions and Script fields, such as: Love/Hate, on the other hand, has an editor window where you define a table of factions and affinities. You can configure gameplay actions to automatically update affinities. The Dialogue System integration also lets you update affinities in conversations. At runtime in the editor, you can inspect each NPC to see its table of affinities to other factions. These editor features aren't available in the Dialogue System.

Quest Machine:
In the Dialogue System, you define quests by filling in a list of fields (Name, Description, State, etc.). You're responsible for advancing quest states -- for example, using SetQuestState("My Quest", "success") in a dialogue entry's Script field.

Quest Machine, on the other hand, uses a visual node-based editor. At runtime, it shows the current state of each quest node. It also has more gameplay components to help automatically advance quest states.

Both Quest Machine and the Dialogue System have quest journal UIs, quest tracking HUDs, and quest indicators (e.g., overhead icons). They're a little easier to set up in Quest Machine, but they're fully functional in both.


I recommend making a small example of each feature in the Dialogue System. If you don't like using the Dialogue System's built-in status & relationship functions, then look into Love/Hate. If you don't like defining your quests in the Dialogue Editor window, or if you don't like the more labor-intensive way of setting up quest indicators in the Dialogue System, then look into Quest Machine. You can download evaluation versions of either one. I recommend trying the evaluation version before buying.

I've been using Dialogue System for years and just added Quest Machine to our setup a few months ago. We use to the two systems simultaneously and even though it's a bit complex to get everything working together the payoff is significant.

I'm really enjoying the Quest Editor for designing quests and linking the Quest Nodes to Dialogue System conversations. I find the forced structure is extremely helpful for managing larger databases (and also for duplicating and modifying existing quests and dialogue).

One other huge addition Quest Machine added is the ability to dynamically monitor item counts. Say for example if you ave a quest to collect 3 items. With Dialogue System there is only a counter for items added. So if your player drops an item on they're way back to the NPC to complete the quest the UI system has no way of indicating if the status has changed (Obviously there was ways around this, but none right out of the box that I'm aware of). With Quest Machine you can set up a checker node that detects if the required level drops below this amount and if so resets the quest sub state to active. It's a small thing but makes a huge difference.

I kind of consider using Dialogue System and Quest Machine as an uber Dialogue System. Tony has made a bunch of changes recently to improve the integration between the two assets that makes them work together pretty seamlessly. And yes, the Procedural Quests do add a crazy amount of return for the investment.

It's a bit of work getting your head around the different work flows but once you establish a method I find it to be much quicker setting up new quests and dialogue.

Nathan

Thanks, Nathan! It's invaluable to read customer experiences from devs like you who are using the assets in projects. I try to be objective, but as the asset publisher my words can carry only so much weight.

FAQ: Love/Hate & Dialogue System for Unity

Having received a few questions about the difference between the relationship systems in Love/Hate and the Dialogue System for Unity, especially regarding interactive conversations, I thought I'd post a FAQ answer here:

The Dialogue System has a simple relationship system in which you can manually adjust relationship values between characters, typically as a result of the player's conversation choices. (More info: Manual, Relationship Functions)

Love/Hate does not do branching conversations, but it can integrate with the Dialogue System for branching conversations. Love/Hate's relationship system is more sophisticated. In Love/Hate, games can not only adjust relationship values as a result of the player's conversation's choices, but they can also automatically adjust relationship values as a result of regular gameplay actions.

Love/Hate was inspired by something that bothered me about Mass Effect 1 (which is otherwise one of my top games of all time). Mass Effect 1 has a hard-coded event on one planet: If you run over too many space monkeys with your Mako on one specific planet, a companion NPC will get upset. But, since this is hard-coded, if you run over space monkeys on any other planet the companion NPC will not take notice. This is because the event was specially hard-coded by the writer. In Love/Hate, you can define information about regular gameplay actions, and nearby characters will automatically judge those actions when the player performs them. This way you don't have to hard-code specific events in specific game locations. (More info: Manual, Video Tutorials)

If your game doesn't need that level of detail, then you can get by with just the Dialogue System.