Dialogue With Inanimate Objects

[rloft123]

So In Disco Elysium I'm curious how they potentially went about differentiating between interacting with NPCs (a portrait would appear) versus interacting with an object to inspect it (still pulls up a dialogue node with responses regarding what the player wants to do). So far all of my text UI has been the same, standard area for dialogue and area for NPC portrait. Curious about some general advice on how to go about that.

Also, would these objects also have the same scripts as anything else, a proximity selector, Dialogue System Trigger, and Usable? It just seems like a lot to add to potentially many objects in the game that can be interacted with.

Also bonus question, when some random object is clicked in that game and a bark appears, is that Dialogue System as well?

Thanks.

[Tony Li]

Yes to barks and object interaction. If I recall, Disco Elysium used NGUI, so their UI implementation is a little different. (The Dialogue System is UI system-independent; it's not limited to just Unity UI.) In your case, if the only difference is that you don't want to show a portrait image, you can assign the inanimate object conversations to actor(s) without portraits. Alternatively, you can use a Dialogue Actor to change the subtitle panel number to a subtitle panel that doesn't show portraits, or you can use an Override Dialogue UI component to make it use an entirely different dialogue UI.

[rloft123]

Thanks for the quick response, that makes sense. As for my question around all the components being added to each game object, that would be the ideal approach right? Say in Disco Elysium you go to inspect the garbage bin, it seems to operate just like if you were to go talk to an NPC. So would all those interactable objects have Proximity Selector, Selector Use Standard UI Elements, Dialogue System Trigger, Usable, and Dialogue Actor?

[Tony Li]

Yes. You can create a prefab with those components and add it as a child to your inanimate objects. This way you don't have to manually add and configure the components on each individual object.