25 réponses à ce sujet

[DLAN_Immortality]

Hi!

Do we have a list of tags for dialogs?

I need to write something as simple as "Hi, my name is <PLAYERNAME>".

Thanks :-)

[Phaenan]

I believe it's <FirstName/>. You'll have to reserve 20 characters in your dialog line when using the token, otherwise the line may exceed the 60 chars limits once the token is replaced by the PC name.

[Qkrch]

I've been loking into the 2das fo getting all the possible convo tags nd my surprise that there are only a few, these are the only I found:

Proper tags:

- FirstName
- LastName
- FullName
- DogName

Formatting:

- <emp> = <b>: Bold, <desc>, <act>. <attrib>, <tittle>, <bodytittle>, <excerpt> : All these are equal to italic formatting = <i>
- <center> -> pure html
- <StartAction>, <StartCheck>, <StartHighlight>

I can't find more. Are these all the convo tags? :/ Can you create more on the fly?

So i think... forget TimeofDay, SirMadam and all those are lost?

Modifié par Qkrch, 22 novembre 2009 - 11:41 .

[Phaenan]

Yep, most tokens - including custom ones - were lost to the addition of the full voice-over.

[CID-78]

all we really need is CustomTokens back.

[DLAN_Immortality]

Thanks, guys!!!! :-D

[stuntpope]

There is no voice over on the PC so I don't see why it should be restricted.

[DLAN_Immortality]

Because a line for the PC only has 60 characters. Your full name could be up to 20 characters, therefore, if you do not want the line that the PC says to be cut, you have to reserve 20 characters for it.

[stuntpope]

Sorry I wasn't clear, I meant that I didn't see why the variety of tags needed to be restricted for the PC. I get the point about the length of the string. I also understand why it is not posisble for the VO to handle tags.

Modifié par stuntpope, 23 novembre 2009 - 12:12 .

[FalloutBoy]

Does this mean there is no speech tags for "he/she" or "him/her" or "man/woman" depending on the PC's gender?

[Proleric]

Correct.

[Awildawn]

I was just hopping that I hadn't found the tokens... This is not easy. My mod may have shifted from human rogue only to human male rogue only if I can't find the courage to copy/correct/paste the dialogs..

[BryanDerksen]

The way we do it internally is to have completely separate lines for he/she, and use a plot flag to choose which one is played for the player (in this case gen00pt_class_race_gend). I put a feature request for custom tokens into the system back in the day but it doesn't have high priority for being added, unfortunately.



There is voice over on the PC, it's a simple matter of putting correctly-named .wav files into the override directory. See http://social.biowar....php/Voice_over

[ixobelle]

tittle?

Modifié par ixobelle, 24 novembre 2009 - 05:21 .

[AndarianTD]

I expressed concern about the lack of tags at the Builder Event this summer, as well as the dialogue length limits in the conversation editor (which fortunately turned out not to be being enforced). I think it's understandable given Bioware's focus on creating a completely voiced game, and helping modders to form teams (e.g. via website features) including voice actors. Tags are mostly useful in the kind of non-voiced, text-oriented modding environment that many of us were familiar with from NWN.

The lack of tokens can mostly be gotten around the way Bryan describes -- by duplicating lines and tailoring them for gender, etc. with node conditionals. Unfortunately that means repeating essentially the same line perhaps many times with minor variations. The focus on voicing makes for a great OC, but it also makes for a bit more work and raises the barriers to entry for modders to build with DA.

Modifié par AndarianTD, 25 novembre 2009 - 12:12 .

[NewYears1978]

Is there a tag that wouldhide the text (for when you don't want TAB to show an item)?

[Dmuse]

This also explains the rampant gender discrimination/discontinuity in the game.

[Proleric]

If "gender discontinuity" means being treated as male when your character is female (or vice-versa), that's a symptom of the "toolset corrupts the OC" bug. Last I heard, Bioware was hoping to fix that in the next patch.

[FalloutBoy]

AndarianTD wrote...

I expressed concern about the lack of tags at the Builder Event this summer, as well as the dialogue length limits in the conversation editor (which fortunately turned out not to be being enforced). I think it's understandable given Bioware's focus on creating a completely voiced game, and helping modders to form teams (e.g. via website features) including voice actors. Tags are mostly useful in the kind of non-voiced, text-oriented modding environment that many of us were familiar with from NWN.

The lack of tokens can mostly be gotten around the way Bryan describes -- by duplicating lines and tailoring them for gender, etc. with node conditionals. Unfortunately that means repeating essentially the same line perhaps many times with minor variations. The focus on voicing makes for a great OC, but it also makes for a bit more work and raises the barriers to entry for modders to build with DA.

It will be more work to make separate lines for male and female, but it will force authors to write more unique dialogs which encourage replayability. I can live with that.

[FalloutBoy]

NewYears1978 wrote...

Is there a tag that wouldhide the text (for when you don't want TAB to show an item)?

That's a different topic, but I can think of ways to do it. Basically don't place the hidden item. Instead you would spawn it under the right conditions. Either the player walks through a trigger or maybe script it to spawn if the player passes a Cunning check or something like that.

[AndarianTD]

FalloutBoy wrote...

It will be more work to make separate lines for male and female, but it will force authors to write more unique dialogs which encourage replayability. I can live with that.

To some extent I agree, and  I don't see any reasonable way to combine tags with voice acting. But I also don't think it's as simple as you're suggesting here for folks who are building non-voiced modules. Often, it simply doesn't make sense to write different lines by gender, race, etc. Replayability isn't an end in itself, and distinct lines may even detract from a conversation rather than add to it if they appear contrived. I think that's especially true for certain styles of module building, such as linear roleplaying.

Also, every line of dialogue that is written also has to be edited. You can write essentially the same line several times, cut and pasted with minor edits for pronouns and the like. But then you also have to edit all of those lines. I frequently tweak dialogue, and it's a lot easier and less error-prone to do that on a single line with tags instead of on five separate lines. It's like cutting and pasting the same code in different places, instead of modularizing, parametrizing, and encapsulating it into a function, subroutine, or macro. That strikes the programmer in me as a recipe for trouble, for many of the same reasons.

Then there's the reduction in "flavor" due to tradeoffs in writing effort. I've already noticed this in the OC, and I don't think it's surprising. When you're forced to write distinct lines to refer to the player's gender, for example, then you're motivated to try to remove those references as much as possible and to make your writing more generic. You have an incentive to save the writing of multiple lines for where it really counts, since you can't do it all the time.

Then there's the simple reduction in flexibility from not having tokens, especially custom ones and not just the standard player ones. For example, in Sanctum of the Archmage (in NWN), I have a (romanceable) companion who can be either male or female, depending on the player's choice at the beginning of the series. I dealt with that by setting custom tokens for the pronouns and other gender-specific terms needed in dialogs and journals for the character. That allowed me to save separate lines by gender for cases where the writing really needed to be substantially different, otherwise combining player and companion pronoun tags in a single line. Without those tokens, I would have to cut and paste 2x2 = 4 separate lines, one for each gender combination of the player and the companion.

You're right that there are advantages to writing distinct lines of dialogue, and to voice acting a module if you can manage it. But there are also costs, and those should be borne in mind as well.

Modifié par AndarianTD, 29 novembre 2009 - 08:43 .

[FollowTheGourd]

I dunno if this would cause a rupture in the spacetime continuum, or worse, but I believe I can modify the conversation GUI to replace arbitrary custom tokens with a word based on the speaker's gender (and maybe some other data), and probably even look up the word in a TLK to boot. If I can't get it directly, it may be possible to infer the player's class too, based on a few things.

Anyway, I'm still pretty limited in what information I can get from the GUI, though, but shouldn't be limited in the tags I can "create" that correspond to what data I can pull from the GUI side. I'd have rather not done it from this side, but as best as I can tell, we can't create custom tokens in DAScript. I'm also not sure if it'd be possible to create a "setCustomToken" function, but maybe I could read some "custom tokens" as strrefs from a (M)2DA file (but which one could I use?) That wouldn't be as dynamic, but it'd be better than nothing I guess...

Last I heard we don't have any of the localization resources BioWare had for creating the game, but if it were to support other languages I'm guessing I'd have to make multiple tokens for other languages. Edit: hopefully not one for each declination -  I'm pretty rusty at German... but instead of just  a [his/her] dog in English, I'd probably need a [sein/ihr] Hund, [sein/ihr]e Katze,  mit [sein/ihr]em Hund and so on. Maybe there's a better way... or if I can find a 2DA to use, maybe let people define their own tokens in there so I don't have to know all languages. [smilie]../../../images/forum/emoticons/wink.png[/smilie]

If you're doing voice overs, I don't know if I could "play" the right one, but I think that's usually handled by just not mentioning the gender or name in speech. You read "Hello, [name]", but only hear "Hello". As for personal pronouns... maybe it'll be more useful if you're not going to be doing voice overs.

I've tried this with and without a party, as a female and male hero... it seems to work for me.
This is the p-code required in conversation.gfx to get the gender, not do the token substitution, but we should be able to do that in the ProcessText() function before it gets sent off to the engine (or wherever) to get further substituted.

Also, this only looks at the hero's gender - not any arbitrary speaker's, but I'm sure you know what gender your talking NPC would be.

The following isn't useful to anybody who doesn't want to edit p-code in the GUI. I think I'll try making an experimental mod that gives you a few more conversation tokens, but here's the thing I wrote to verify it should be feasible:

// Get Hero's ID
//Edit: "Party.Hero.ID" might be better, but 0.ID seems to also work.
push 'Party.Members.0.ID', 1, 'ExternalCommands'
getVariable
push 'GetNumber' // Not 'GetValue'
callMethod

// Get Hero's gender. 1 = Male. 2 = Female.
push 'GetGender', 2, 'flash'
getVariable
push 'external'
getMember
push 'ExternalInterface'
getMember
push 'call'
callMethod

Modifié par FollowTheGourd, 30 novembre 2009 - 02:16 .

[Proleric]

FalloutBoy wrote...

NewYears1978 wrote...

Is there a tag that wouldhide the text (for when you don't want TAB to show an item)?

That's a different topic, but I can think of ways to do it. Basically don't place the hidden item. Instead you would spawn it under the right conditions. Either the player walks through a trigger or maybe script it to spawn if the player passes a Cunning check or something like that.

...or SetObjectInteractive to FALSE when you want an object to be visible but not selectable or identified by TAB. Meanwhile, back on topic...

[FollowTheGourd]

To add to what I wrote above, I figured out how to put in a race token now - or anything in the character sheet, pretty well. So you could write something like "Hail to you, [race/human]" - subbing in either your race or the word "friend", "traveller", your background, or something else if you're a human. Similar tokens for other things, maybe for even not so nice things...  Maybe a little xenophobic, but sounds better than "Hail to you, human" coming from another human... Of course you could still just have a token that does exactly what it's asked to...

But just to reiterate: this would require a mod to the GUI file itself, which I could do. It just feels dirty having to resort to it.

I don't know if anybody else is looking at modding the GUI files, but look at CreatureUtils in the ActionScript... the "token" for the hero is 'Party.Hero', so through the ExternalCommands class, you can get 2DA and other values by things like 'Party.Hero.Stats.Race'. At least that would seem to be the correct token - it works, and there's a function that compares tokens to IDs and it would strongly suggest that's all the token is.

Modifié par FollowTheGourd, 30 novembre 2009 - 01:49 .

[Quaxo]

"I shall call you ageless, faceless, gender-neutral, culturally ambiguous, adventurer person. AFGNCAAP for short." -Dalboz of Gurth, the Dungeon Master, from Zork: Grand Inquisitor

Modifié par Quaxo, 30 novembre 2009 - 02:00 .