Pixel Crushers Forum

Hi there.

We are starting a new project and are trying to decide which dialogue system to use. I like the features of Dialogue System for Unity, especially the upcoming UI Toolkit support, but my concern is about the workflow and appreciate any comments from users or PC.

We have somewhere around 3000+ conversations with several overall story arcs we have to manage and balance across dozens of characters (mystery game). We are concerned about the workflow: how to write, version, diff, change and manage all the dialogue.

DSFU has importing, but seems like it's very editor-centric. Is that so? What kind of workflow options do we have to create the dialogue outside that includes variables and other metadata?

Any advice or comments welcome!

Hi,

I'm not sure what you mean by editor-centric. (It could be interpreted multiple ways.) You can import dialogue from multiple sources. See Import & Export. You can also duplicate ConverterWindowTemplate.cs and write your own importer by filling in your code where the comments indicate.

If you can share an idea of your specific requirements, I might be able to provide more guidance or suggestions,

Thanks for the reply Tony.

What I mean is that we don't want to do any editing in the Unity editor, or as little as possible. We want to do all the editing in text files, including actors, items, variables, conditionals, etc. and in Unity it just does the playback. Ideally it would be in the DSFY format, but I don't see DSFY listed as import format, nor do I see a text based asset file in the docs, correct me if I'm wrong.

Is this possible? Can we keep editing externally all the way through shipping? Does DSFY have it's own text file format or we need to chose one of the others?

Thanks!

What text format are you using? Are you editing it in a plain text editor? Or an editor that can accurately represent conversation trees, etc.?

Many studios write their content in external formats and import them into Unity either at design time or runtime. Some set them up to import at runtime during development, so writers can just load up an executable Unity build and have it import their changes at runtime. Then before release they switch to importing it just once at design time for the release build.

It's a new project, so any format probably works. We looked at the popular ones from external solutions like articy draft to hybrid like Yarn Spanner. We can work with any of them. We just need plain text files that we can diff and version control. Ideally there would be a native DSFU text file format and we'd use that? Are there any plans for a native text based format?

Technically you can use JSON or even CSV (Excel/Sheets) or other text formats. (See the Import & Export link above). But since conversations are typically directed graphs, the content needs to represent structured data, whether it's in plain text or not. Once in the Dialogue System, the data is in a DialogueDatabase object. Assuming you've set your Unity project to use text serialization, DialogueDatabase assets are stored in YAML text format. That's your "native" text format for the Dialogue System. But it's probably a waste of time to think about it at that level. No one writes branching dialogue in plain text, with the exception of domain-specific languages such as Ink and Yarn. Identify your writers' ideal workflow -- for example, hand-editing Ink text files, or editing Yarn files in the Yarn Editor, or setting up multiuser articy:draft or Arcweave, or whatever they prefer. Then set up the Dialogue System to work with it.

Thanks Tony, appreciate the replies/advice.

Glad to help!