Best Solution For One-Off Actors?

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givemeahat
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Jul 08, 2020 3:21 pm

Best Solution For One-Off Actors?

Post by givemeahat »

Hey Everyone!

The project I'm currently working on is a point-and-click style mystery game. Each scene has a variety of objects the player can interact with. As a result, I have a lot of one-off "Actors" for each item. This works well enough for now, but doesn't feel very graceful long-term; I was wondering if there was a way to manually enter the name of an actor into the dialogue (or otherwise override an actor's name) for each conversation?

An ideal solution would be to have a placeholder "Interactive Item" Actor, whose name I could override for each conversation. I'm hoping this makes it easier to organize my database further down the line.

Thanks!
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Tony Li
Posts: 22143
Joined: Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:27 pm

Re: Best Solution For One-Off Actors?

Post by Tony Li »

Hi,

Yes; create an Interactive Item placeholder Actor in your database, and use that for interaction conversations.

Add a Dialogue Actor component to each actual item GameObject. Click the circle to the right of the Actor dropdown to turn it into a text entry field, and enter the item name there.
givemeahat
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Jul 08, 2020 3:21 pm

Re: Best Solution For One-Off Actors?

Post by givemeahat »

Hi Tony, thanks for the response! I created the placeholder actor in the database, added the Dialogue Actor component to the GameObject and changed the name in the text field. Unfortunately, the name still shows up as "Interactable Object" when the conversation is triggered.
givemeahat
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Jul 08, 2020 3:21 pm

Re: Best Solution For One-Off Actors?

Post by givemeahat »

Sorry for the double post! This solution works if I create brand new conversations - for some reason it wasn't working with conversations I'd previously made. Thank you again for your help!
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Tony Li
Posts: 22143
Joined: Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:27 pm

Re: Best Solution For One-Off Actors?

Post by Tony Li »

Hi,

You might have needed to set the conversation's Actor in the existing conversations. To set the conversation's Actor, select Menu > Conversation Properties.
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