Managing complex bark scenarios
Posted: Fri Feb 26, 2016 8:41 am
I apologize for asking a lot of "abstract" questions at the moment but I am just trying to get my head around the processes before I start down a path.
So in my scenario I have a player who frequently interacts with a handful of NPCs, and I want them to change their barks (passive descriptive text/outbursts) based upon actions the player has taken, so I am imagining I will end up with LOTS of variables all over the place defining meaningful interactions the player has had and I will have lots of barks which basically output certain stuff based upon those variables, also some of them should be one time only things, so vars to track if the player has already had one bark etc.
Anyway so I can foresee there being HUNDREDS of barks here as unlike most scenarios where its lots of minor/repeated interactions with lots of generic NPCs, this is very much major interactions with a few named NPCs.
So currently from what I can tell all barks are single nodes (or more) derived from a start node, which is fine for a few, but when you have a lot of them, is there any way to group them or tag them or anything to make it easy to differentiate which parts are in which scenes etc? I was thinking about maybe having multiple conversation container per character, so lets say 1 for the first scene barks, one for the next scene barks etc so that way its not just one huge conversation container full of all barks for that NPC.
So are there any pointers on trying to best manage this sort of thing?
So in my scenario I have a player who frequently interacts with a handful of NPCs, and I want them to change their barks (passive descriptive text/outbursts) based upon actions the player has taken, so I am imagining I will end up with LOTS of variables all over the place defining meaningful interactions the player has had and I will have lots of barks which basically output certain stuff based upon those variables, also some of them should be one time only things, so vars to track if the player has already had one bark etc.
Anyway so I can foresee there being HUNDREDS of barks here as unlike most scenarios where its lots of minor/repeated interactions with lots of generic NPCs, this is very much major interactions with a few named NPCs.
So currently from what I can tell all barks are single nodes (or more) derived from a start node, which is fine for a few, but when you have a lot of them, is there any way to group them or tag them or anything to make it easy to differentiate which parts are in which scenes etc? I was thinking about maybe having multiple conversation container per character, so lets say 1 for the first scene barks, one for the next scene barks etc so that way its not just one huge conversation container full of all barks for that NPC.
So are there any pointers on trying to best manage this sort of thing?