Pixel Crushers Forum

Prefacing this by saying that I've been following tutorials/the manual but I'm still a newbie to this kind of thing, so apologies if this is overly simplistic.

Basically I have a single ink story/json that I'm trying to integrate within the dialogue system. By working through the "Quick Start" video tutorial and the Ink integration guide I've gotten it to a stage where it's playable in its most basic state: the conversation is triggered by an NPC and it plays from there out, with the existing dialogue options and variables all working fine. So far so good.

However it doesn't look as if the Ink story has been added/converted to the dialogue database's Conversations panel, so there's no dialogue tree even though the information is being pulled from somewhere - am I missing something really obvious here? I'd rather not recreate the entire conversation node by node lol.

If this is all too basic for this channel I'd appreciate any direction toward more info on Ink integration in general, if it exists! Thanks for any help.

Hi,

Ink stories won't appear in the Dialogue Editor. Unlike the Dialogue System's native format and the other import formats (Twine, articy:draft,. Chat Mapper, etc.), an Ink story isn't really a conversation tree. Or, at least, it's so far from the other formats that the Dialogue System doesn't treat it like a tree. Instead, the Dialogue System acts as a front-end and lets Ink do all the data processing of the story.

If you need a visual tree, I recommend using a different format such as Twine, TalkIt, Chat Mapper, or articy:draft. (The latter two are commercial products.) If you're dead set on writing your conversations in plain text, you could look into the JLC import format, which is a simple text-based format for conversations. The Dialogue System Extras page has an imported for the JLC format.

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the reply - that's good to know, I didn't realise that was the case when I did my initial research on Ink. I suppose there's no easy way to add conditions/scripts/events to certain portions of Ink dialogue without having a conversation tree to add them to?

If that's the case I'll look into rewriting my story for Twine import since I'm somewhat familiar with it. Thanks again for your help 🙌

You can still add conditions, etc., with Ink. You can set and maintain them in Ink and/or use External Functions to get and set Dialogue system variables.

Although Twine is a good choice, too. And it imports into an actual Dialogue System dialogue database, which is handy.

Cheers Tony, thanks for explaining the available options. I really appreciate the help!

Glad to help!