Alerts for descriptive text?

[grofit]

I know this depends upon scenario, but I have scenarios where:

- Player talks to NPC (Conversation)
- NPC says something out loud (Bark)
- Player investigates NPC/Item (Alert?)

Now it seems that the descriptive text for npcs and items should be alerts, but I just wanted to confirm that this is the intended use case. The player isn't explicitly investigating as such, it is more the player "uses" an NPC who has exhausted current dialog options or is in a state of non conversing, or the player clicks on something of note.

So anyway am I right in thinking that I should be using alerts for these scenarios?

[Tony Li]

Hi,

As you said, it depends on the scenario. Alerts would work, as would barks. For example, you could add a Conversation Trigger and a Bark Trigger to a Usable (an NPC or item). Set the Conditions on each trigger so it barks if there are no available dialogue options, or runs a conversation otherwise. You could do the same with an Alert Trigger instead of a Bark Trigger.

It also depends on how you want your UI to look. Barks typically appear over the Usable's head, and you have individual control over the appearance of each Usable's bark UI. All alerts use the same alert UI elements defined in the dialogue UI.

[grofit]

I see it being more like a dialogue aesthetically, so assuming there is some generic dialog box down bottom left (for example) when viewing descriptive text I would expect to see some text in the dialog area but no avatar or anything, hence why alerts seemed to be the missing part.

I mean I could do all this outside of the system, but thinking ahead given I can get text localisation through this it makes sense to tie all the text in the game into this system.

[Tony Li]

Definitely. Plenty of games do exactly what you describe. Some of them use alerts, others use barks, depending on what they want aesthetically. Alerts will work just fine.