Legacy:Dash/Developer Journal

September 27, 2004

This is my first journal entry and I am relatively new to contributing to the wiki so bare with me. I have used the wiki quite often in the past and it has been a huge help. I will contribute anything I come across while modding to wiki from now on. My current Project is Call to Arms an Action RPG for UT2k4. We released a "demo" (I don’t like releasing "Betas”) recently for phase 4 of the MSU. While it didn’t have a lot of content to explore it shows a lot of promise and is a pretty big departure from UT2k4 in terms of type of game and mods usually created for it. I am currently fixing bugs and adding new systems I haven't implemented yet like a more dynamic NPC dialog system.

My current design is to have a conversation object associated with every NPC that would have an array of Dialog objects (What the NPC says). The Dialog objects would have an array of Option Objects that would list the option and call a delegate function when selected that would either perform some action relating to the game or open a different dialog. I am not entirely happy with this design mostly because its not terribly dynamic in that it will be hard to change the flow of the conversation (conditional branches) or lock out branches of the conversation to be triggered later. I really haven't given a whole lot of thought on the design (bad coder) and have gotten it partially implemented (bad coder again). Anyway I should go over my design again, if anybody has any design ideas or knows of any systems used in other games let me know.