37 réponses à ce sujet

[Bond]

       Couple a days ago i made the horrible mistake of replaying Dragon Age Origins and Awakening and now i am obsessed with everything about the new inquisition installement. Before i go any further i would like to adress that i replayed DA2(yep from start to finish...) as well. 
 
      With that being said i would like to analyze the dialogue system in both games. I find DAO superior due to reasons i will explain in a minute but lets begin with the 2 flaws. The mute protagonist and the interface, which resembles reading a book. You addressed those things in DA2 and i believe many people appreciate it. 
   
     So, for DAI everything is perfect right ? Not really, While dialog wheel is very good interface-wise, i think you need to look why people fell in love with the characters and interactions in Dragon Age Origins. First of all there is no good, neutral, bad line. Or at least not all the time. Further, there is no indication that when you say something, you are gonna upset someone. You just need to pay attention to who are you talking. The simplicity of good/bad, blue/red, does no one favors. People who want to skip the dialogue(the so called casual crowd) will do it all the same, But the core Dragon Age fanbase want a complex system, which is not really that far, Just random generate the location of the line on the wheel. On several occasions Mass Effect 1 did this, so it is achievable. Put there more investigate options, where you dont aim to bed someone, or give him a pep talk, just to learn something new. 
 
     If you really merge the dialogue that way, you may still not achieve the perfect algorithm of interacting with companions and NPC, but i will bet you anything, that it will be improvement over the past 2 games, which is the point of the sequels. Now few other things i believe will do you good. Implement the best thing of Mass Effect dialogue(no, not the ABC options), but the fact that you can shut someone middle speech with some action, or give him a compliment out of no where, while he talks. People complain about simplicity of Good and Bad line but no one complains about being able to change conversation path in the middle of it. Witcher 2 tried to do sth similar after that, because it is fresh and intuitive.
     
     There you go, the best from all of your projects combined. When you add the interactive party banter you announced in some panel a while ago, you got something new, and the best of your old projects. Walking out of conversation is another thing i appreciate. I hope if you read this post, to give it some thought. :happy:
   
    I would like to finish by saying, i think you find some odd inspiration in fable series... please dont, just dont, ever, dont,not a good idea, dont.... There are 2 games i would write this kind of post 1 year before release. This one and the new mass effect, cause i really care about those projects, and i sincerely want to help make them better. Keep up the amazing work, we will keep supporting you.
  And last but not least, i want in this topic all folks who have opinion on the subject to fire some suggestions, i hope for even better ones then mine.

Modifié par LoyalFan, 16 février 2014 - 03:26 .

[David Gaider]

Now...two months later, i can assure you i still think that they are terrible, out of place, childish, unnecessery, oversimplifying, ugly, out of depth and simply dumb. Hope you see it one day. Maybe not today, maybe not even next year, but one day in the future.

 

That's a lot of adjectives, considering they also seem to encompass anything we do with the system for DAI—which you haven't seen yet.

 

At this point, I'm afraid I'm quite content to put out what we've worked on and let people eventually give feedback to that, rather than listen to people respond to DA2 as if that's all it is and ever could be. Even so, we're quite aware there will always be people who will never like the voiced protagonist and/or the dialogue wheel system (and sometimes conflate issues between the two, which is fine) and would like us to toss the entire thing out of the window rather than work on refining it...and ultimately we have to be okay with that, considering there are also benefits for doing things as we've chosen to do. If you count among those people, then I'm very sorry. It's not going to happen.

[David Gaider]

However, please do tell us more about the dialogue system. It sounds fascinating and I really am interested in how it'll all play out.

 

What questions do you have? I've explained a number of things in various places, so I'm never sure what one person to the next has actually heard. I don't think I have anything new to add, but I can always repeat something, if need be.

[John Epler]

I have never said anything about voiced protagonist and dialogue wheel systems in my post. I am giving my opinion on the childish icons, which are already confirmed. Yet your posts seems to never bother with actual topic of my statement, instead you speak about bunch of things, completely non related  to the thing i said.

 

Some people appreciate the icons, even as they were presented in DA2.

 

You do not.

 

That is fine.

 

Belittling the intelligence of others because they don't agree with you, however, is -not- fine.If you'd like to have a discussion that isn't essentially you saying 'I don't like this and if you do, you're dumb and childish', that is a discussion that can be had, although as Dave said, you don't have a lot of information to go on at the moment.

 

If it's going to be you trying to make your preference out to be objectively better and, consequentially, make yourself sound smarter, that is a discussion that isn't going to happen.

[David Gaider]

My questions may not be ones you can answer because of subjectiveness, but does it all work intuitively? If there are three wheels? Or do they come out depending upon each specific dialogue?  Like, in any given conversation (meaning one set of dialogue in which I choose a response) is there only one wheel at play, or more? Does it depend on what's being asked/answered/discussed? And about the tone wheel, what sort of emotions does it express?

 

The different "types" of wheels are more or less invisible to the end user—truly it's a distinction which only we writers pay attention to, but if you're someone who analyzes the dialogue wheels as they're used in conversation, you'll see the differences.

 

Ultimately, as I've said previously, we have three main types in use:

 

Tone Wheel: This is used for what we call "flavor dialogue", where the player's not really expressing an opinion or making any kind of active choice, but is mainly reacting to the existing dialogue with personality. These wheels can consist of simply the three main "tones" (in DAI, that's Direct, Clever, and Noble) but will also have Special options (any options which are specific to a special condition, such as the existence of a romance, player variances such as race/class/gender, previous plot choices, etc.) as well as Investigate options. In DAO, this type of hub also existed, and used the same tones. It just didn't have icons, and the Special/Investigate options were bundled together in the same list.

 

Choice Wheel: This is used for both active choices (when the player is choosing what to do) as well as situations where we have the player expressing an opinion and don't want to conflate opinions with tones (this happened occasionally in DA2, and we didn't like how that played so we broke it back out into something separate). Like the tone wheel, Special and Investigate options can also exist here. Really the only difference between the two is the fact the Choice Wheel responses are always "neutral" toned (meaning they simply lack the inflection of Direct/Clever/Noble and could apply to any personality, unlike in DA2 where every Choice option had three different resulting lines based on dominant tone) and the icons are different.

 

Reaction Wheel: This is a slightly rarer wheel, used for when something has happened where we believe the player will be responding with emotion rather than opinion (or, at least, we provide that option). When this comes up, the possible options are: Enraged, Sad, Pleased, Surprised, Confused, Afraid...and Stoic, for the "neutral" option. We use whichever ones we feel are appropriate to the situation, never all of them. There are no Special or Investigate options on this sort of wheel.

 

And that's it. We use whatever wheel works anytime a player response hub comes up, so a given conversation might use one, two, or even all three of these wheels in turn. As for how intuitive it is, I'm not sure. We're going for ways to write the dialogue intuitively, and overall I think it works a bit better than in DA2 (we've certainly had more time to play with it and test it), but I imagine that'll work to varying degrees for the user based on their expectation, as with any interface.

[David Gaider]

We've heard in some places that the "action wheel" (I think it's called?) is used for both making decisions and expressing our opinion on big, weighty issues.

 

For issues responses, will the available options be binary? Is there room for nuance in how we approach the big topics? I'm just curious how this wheel is differentiated from the normal conversation one, given in the past there were up to four or five different ways to respond to some question or dilemmas. 

 

It doesn't have to be "big, weighty issues" -- it might simply be the player indicating their opinion on whatever subject has arisen. If we feel the responses don't really map to a Tone Wheel, we'll use the Choice Wheel instead. Then we can freely add up to five options (or more, if there are options which map to the Special, which can break out to a sub-wheel in the same manner as Investigates if there are more than one). At that point, we'll use as many options as we feel cover the bases, depending on the subject at hand.

[David Gaider]

David, are you able to tell us any about the "joining party banter" system? I believe I read somewhere that the Inquisitor will be able to take part in random party banter while strolling along (or can choose not to participate) and I'm wondering how that would work?

 

I'm not sure this is something that's easily explained, as opposed to shown.

 

This gist of how it works is this: if there is ambient dialogue (which party banter is), and a possible player response comes up, you'll get a cue to "click in" if you want to speak. If you don't, the dialogue simply moves on without you (after a certain amount of time). If you do, you get an actual response wheel (though this will stop you from moving until you select your response).

 

Note that how this works (or if it remains in at all) is subject to change. Very subject, in fact, as it's a new thing we're poking at.

[David Gaider]

When player picks a certain emotion off the wheel will NPCs be able to respond to that?

 

Sure. Why wouldn't they be able to?

[David Gaider]

What would cause it to change: the difficulty in implementing it? Or if it's too disruptive? Or is it a word budget thing? If you can answer that.

 

It's an interface usability thing—or, at least, that's what could potentially torpedo the system, depending on how it plays out over the next few months. Considering the words are already written, and the system uses no cinematics, those aren't really considerations at this point.

[David Gaider]

David, it's also been said that we can talk to companions outside of a camp/base/Keep area - is this still accurate?

 

Will their conversations there have a quota of sort-of-encyclopaedic "tell me about yourself/your culture/your faction" questions? I actually really enjoyed those from Origins. 

 

(And, although it's been said that companion word budgets in DAO and DA2 were roughly the same, for whatever reason the Origins campfire and roadside conversations did feel meatier and more engaging, at least to me.)

 

Any follower conversations outside of a camp/base/keep area are conversations that are either triggered (meaning it's not the player who clicks on the follower to initiate anything) or ambient (such as the banters). You cannot click on followers anywhere in the world to get the same conversations you would back in the camp/base/keep.

 

Insofar as the conversations you do have in the camp/base/keep, yes, each follower has a number of questions/topics you can cover with them at your discretion (with new ones perhaps opening up over time). So a little more like DAO in that respect.

[David Gaider]

If it turns out to have too many technical difficulties, would the Inquisitor simply not join in party banter or would the Inquisitor engage in party banter in a neutral tone? If you can answer this or perhaps this is a bridge you'll come to if you have to.

 

I imagine we would just go back to the PC never joining in ambient dialogue, as before. That's zero sum, insofar as we're concerned, even if it'd be a bit disappointing, considering how much work we've put into it.

[John Epler]

This is the part where I suggest a toggle and something bad happens to a kitten, right?

It comes down to whether or not it's a good user experience.

 

It's something (along with some other variations thereof) that's been the subject of a number of meetings and various revisions. What we have now I -think- works, but I've been involved with it for almost two years and it's really hard for me to be objective about it.

 

Essentially, it's something we'd really like to put out there, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and that's a call we'll make at some point before ship.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'm not sure why people think a smaller number of words plus a tonal icon works better (by "better," I mean, having the player understand what their character is about to convey and how they are about to convey it). I mean, yes, as I've said a number of times, "anger" as am emotional tone can mean several different kinds of accompanying facial expressions and body language, and it's not like the presence of the angry icon lets us know for sure what we're about do do physically/emotionally (apart from what we're about to say.)

 

For people such as myself, when the wheel first came in in Mass Effect (before I started working at BioWare), is that I was already picking dialogue options based on their tone even when it was full text.

 

If the situation was cordial and I appreciated the person talking, I picked the lines that came across as friendly.  If I was mad, I picked the lines that came across as angry/hostile.  The words used were actually not relevant beyond helping me determine the nature of my response.  I was always bound by the restriction of saying what the game designers allowed me to say, and bound by any inferred sarcasm that they implicitly put into the line.

 

 

Speaking personally, what I like about the dialogue wheel is that I actually watch my character speak and say and do stuff.  Obviously this doesn't work as well if a player wishes much stronger control over the specifics of the response, but that I can actually enjoy seeing the responses play out.  With a full line of dialogue, I find I get stuff like this less often, and I do enjoy that sort of stuff.  I like watching the scene play out, which is also something that I do less of with full written responses.

 

In fact, for games like Alpha Protocol (which was even more condensed than anything BioWare has done, but is probably my personal favourite conversation system in any game) and Mass Effect, I often don't even play with subtitles on because I prefer to watch the scene play out.

 

I feel the main reason I prefer this is because I go into a PC game with the understanding that the conversations will innately not be able to precisely represent my character.  I think it may also be because many of the earlier RPGs I played, like the Ultima games, were based exclusively on key words so I had already had no reservations having no control over the precise words I used, but I could from time to time pick keywords that displayed a particular intent.

 

 

Having said that, I do understand your perspective.  I imagine the amount of control we're willing to give up differs quite a bit, just as I feel the amount of control we feel we're ever actually provided probably doesn't line up.  I'm not sure if the positions are reconcilable, however.  Sometimes the lines the player character can speak get very, very long (an advantage our current system provides).  They also sometimes, structurally, get spread out over several lines which provides some additional challenges to simply showing the full line than simply clicking a button that says "show full line."

 

 

In general I see pros and cons to either, and in both cases neither is really a significant enough yay or nay over the other.  If you were to force me to choose, however, I do like the dialogue wheel system more than full lines of dialogue.  I base this more on games I played not as a developer, so I'm omitting DA2 and DAI from this consideration, but included Alpha Protocol and the Mass Effect games, as well as Human Revolution and so forth.

[Allan Schumacher]

(1) Well, yes, Allan, I definitely agree -- you can read for tone. In fact, I think it's a good skill for dealing with any piece of literature. And I surely agree it is possible to determine the tone of sentences without tone indicators.

 

"Alistair, you are a sad pathetic, excuse of a man, always afraid to face your life's responsibilities!" 

"Alistair, you need to stop being so hard on yourself, and realize it's OK to accept your fears." 

 

I don't think I need a Diplomatic tone marker to figure out the diplomatic sentence from the angry one -- do I? 

 

But, as you just said, you READ to figure out which sentence was friendly, and then picked the friendly sentence, because it was friendly. Or the angry sentence, to decide if it was angry. What that of course makes players do is have to read dialogue and think about their choices, even if it is only to figure out which sentence will be perceived as angry and which one will be perceived as friendly. 

 

The point is, once you signal to the player "this is the friendly response" then I agree they have to do almost no thinking at all. (Well, at least if their approach to giving dialogue responses is similar to yours.) In fact, if you do as some people want and make sure that the friendly response is always in the same position on the wheel, they don't even have to think that much. All they have to think is "pick upper right". "Pick upper right". 

 

Which means, they have to do hardly any thinking at all. And as you may have noted, I really prefer to do more thinking in games, not less.

 

I'm not sure it required much "thinking" about my choice.  At least not in any meaningfully interesting way.  I think I could argue that it prevents a barrier since if I am trying to decipher which response is appropriate for how to respond, I'm not sure if that's the type of thinking that is necessarily considered positive.  For instance, Mass Effect 3's Rannoch scene provided two choices that I spent a lot of time thinking about, but I was thinking about which choice to make, as opposed to thinking "what exactly do each of these choices represent?"  Perhaps ironically, I think that that's the type of stuff that I fight with, akin to how you fight with the idea of "I didn't want my player to say specifically that."

 

That's not that I don't like thinking in my games at all.  During conversations, especially when the stakes are high, I'd qualify my engagement as pretty high and I'm constantly thinking and evaluating what the best course of action would be.  Sometimes tone is a game in and of itself, as some characters can respond to lines in a particular way.

 

 

As for the tone marker, to be honest it'd still come in handy even with full lines.  I've picked lines that I read sarcastically, but the dialogue plays out as though it was done differently.

 

 

 

(2) I may disagree with Sylvius on this, but no I was not a fan of the keyword system of the Ultimas. In fact, I really only felt a satisfying dialogue system when I first started playing certain CRPG games in the 90s, including many made by Bioware. 

 

I was a big fan of the dialogue system in BG2 (made by Bioware), NWN1 (made by Bioware), KOTOR1 (made by Bioware), and DA:O (made by Bioware), though I also have to give props to the system in Planescape Torment and Fallout, though those were not made by Bioware. (Plus NWN2, and KOTOR2, of course, but likewise.)

 

Now, please note, I'm not saying Bioware shouldn't innovate, nor that all innovations in the dialogue area have not been good, but I do have to confess I got the taste for dialogue selection I did in many cases from Bioware games, and I also have to confess I never got the idea why, exactly, it was necessary to reinvent the wheel. So to speak. Now I recognize all the games I'm talking about had an unvoiced protagonist. That said, it's not clear that a voiced protagonist had to wind us up where we are now, although we are here.

 

I saw it as the continued extension of the push to a more cinematic flair.  I remember thinking "It'd be cool if all the lines were voiced" in BG2.  Then I remember thinking "it'd be cool if the player was also voiced" with KOTOR.  There are issues that I know I have once the protagonist is voiced, often relating to subvocalization.

 

One of the reasons I don't play with subtitles on is because I will read the subtitles before the line is delivered.  Mentally, I am now waiting for the line to delivered, when I've already heard and experienced the line as I read it.  This actually is a negative for me, because now I'm waiting... but perhaps cannot skip because the actions of the PC may be relevant to what is going on.  So I turn the subtitles off (I actually have gotten better at reading along with subtitles when they're on, but then I am reading the subtitles, not the activity as it's going on).  Presenting me with a full line of dialogue prior to speaking it places a stronger cognitive strain on me as I watch the dialogue play out while already knowing what is going to be said.

 

I mentioned Deus Ex Human Revolution, but not for the reasons that you like it.  When I say I like what DEHR does, I'm not referring to the inclusion of the full lines of dialogue.  It could not exist and I'd be okay with it.  So I think it's disingenuous to point out that because I like DEHR (and cite it as an example), to twist it into evidently being support for a system that would display both.  Almost frustratingly so, though perhaps also because you're not the first person to do so.  (Aside: I mentioned the game - I don't think it comes across as positively as you may intend for it to by explaining to me a system and feature I'm already aware of....  If it worked for people then I am happy for them.  It's not a huge deal for myself)

 

It also lacks context (I recommend playing the game, both because it's quality and because it might help), because while Deus Ex's conversations (the "conversation challenges in particular") are very interesting, but they're also not nearly as reactive as we try to make ours.

 

So while we may have 3 or 4 line entries that all belong to the same speaker in our dialogue, by breaking the lines up we provide various entry/exit points for those lines.  Imagine the conversation editor has something like this (all lines spoken by the player character... the bulleted lines represent lines that are determined based upon the player character's race.

 

"You dare to question my background...."

• Growing up in Orzammar was not without challenges
• You try growing up in a cutoff alienage where people think you're a freak
• Imagine living in a place where those that claim to protect you can cut you off from your very nature
• I'm a Cousland! You best pay me the respect my family deserves!

 

There's no situation like this in Deus Ex.  The conversation lines that are given to you at any particular point of the conversation are always the same, and don't really react to choices the player makes barring some situations where an extra option plays out because Jensen has some extra information/context (which is still a nice thing in the game).

 

In order to replicate the "full dialogue line" in Deus Ex's style, we'd either have to have the system read ahead of the current dialogue lines (this isn't without risk*) and pieces together the lines into a single entry for the player to now see.  Since our conversations can branch during these, the system is more complicated than simply taking the line as it is, or taking a fixed/predictable subset of the line as Human Revolution does.  Is it worth the effort?  I'm sure you think so.  But keep in mind that people that worked on the old BG games that did what you prefer are still key stakeholders in our current games.

 

Mark Darrah was the programming lead for Baldur's Gate 2, Mike Laidlaw was a writer for Jade Empire, and Gaider has been around since BG2 as well, while Casey Hudson was the guy behind KOTOR that then made Mass Effect.  I think if you piece together BioWare's history of games, the emphasis has always been on the game's narrative and that the presentation of that narrative has gotten increasingly cinematic as technology allowed for it.  So it's not like these decisions aren't made without any acknowledgements of how the old way of doing it once was.

 

 

 

* The DAI conversation system does do some amount of preloading for performance reasons, but only for NPC lines since those lines are predictable, and only if there are no conditions on the line.  But it still has risks because, for example, the first implementation of this had the read ahead inadvertently treat the lines as being reach in game... so conversation lines were firing the scripts attached to them before they should.  This is also why the system doesn't preload past conditioned lines, because it's possible the condition may be influenced by the preceding line.  Even then, DAI's system is a preload that only refers to caching lines for performance reason.  The game doesn't actually "know" what lines are about to be said in any meaningful way... only that "DataString ##### is now at memory address 0x########"

[Allan Schumacher]

So I know you knew about the text-appearance feature, but even though I was addressing you, I was pointing out to others who haven't played it what it was, and how it works. Not you, since you already know. And I wouldn't be a very good debater if I don't take things other people say, and point out how they support my own argument

Fair enough, and I apologize since it's a valid thing you did.  I read the post as being directly towards me which it isn't.

[John Epler]

Oftentimes, patenting a game element is less about 'we don't want anyone else to use this' as it is 'if someone else patents this and then sues us, that would suck'. There are enough patent trolls out there that it's an unfortunate necessity to cover yourself.

[John Epler]

You should not patent conversation icons though No one else is going to use them. Unless Peter Molyneux makes rpg again or sth.

 

Consider this your last warning. Either participate constructively in the thread or be removed.

[David Gaider]

Okay, i wasted enough breath on this, the only thing i am hoping is ME development team are more open minded to change, dont include icons and look up to telltale and alpha protocol. I made my point, off to the ME forums i go, i wont be troubling the mods with deleting such rude, insulting and negative comments as mine. 

 

Heh. So DA2 is childish, the only people who like it are children, and if the devs don't realize what a truly "mature" player wants then they're idiots. But, hey, no insult intended. Have I summed up your argument correctly?

 

Personally, I find it odd that icons are specifically the hill you'd like to die on. I think there was some discussion about a toggle to turn the icons off (as that's pretty low-impact, insofar as toggles go), but let me tell you: the way you make your arguments is hardly going to convince anyone to accommodate you, never mind a developer. If you really think the Mass Effect devs will be more open to this approach of yours, I suspect you'll be disappointed.

 

But naturally that's only because we don't want to listen to well-reasoned criticism, am I right?

[David Gaider]

It would have to be on a toggle. (cue sound of screaming puppy). 

 

If you'd like a more in-depth response on why toggles make me wince, I made a post about it on my blog.

[David Gaider]

To be clear, how do you perceive yourself as responsible for a player's dislike of a toggle option, assuming the wording of the option is clear? If a toggle says "add English subtitles to Mass Effect", ultimately it's not Bioware's fault if I suddenly find the subtitles ruining the cinematic experience.

 

Yes, it is.

 

The majority of players, after all, will not reach the conclusion "the subtitles are ruining my experience". They will say "the dialogue is dull and repetitive" or similar things. So we cannot take all feedback at face value—it's up to us to interpret it, and also consider what kind of game we want to make. We have to consider how toggle changes the play experience, as well as whether or not it's the type of experience we agree with and want to put out there. Because, as I said in the post, we do have to support it once it's in the options.

 

If we don't like what an option does to the game experience, and don't intend to support it, then we're not going to do it. It doesn't matter how many people on a forum are convinced it would be life-altering. The basic conceit in these dialogue threads seems to be that we're trying to make a dialogue interface that is all things to all types of roleplayers.

 

We're really not, and never have done.

[David Gaider]

   Would you explain to me how having a toggle for dialogue icons will ruin the experience ? I am just curious, cause this feature is basically two days work at most.

 

As I said the last time I responded to you, we have discussed a toggle for icons primarily because it's pretty low-impact.

 

It does, however, depend on whether we think it's an improvement, or at the very least doesn't actively detract from anything...meaning we must consider the information that the icons are meant to convey (not all of them are tone icons, after all) and whether we'd be in a situation where some icons must be kept while others are discarded. In that case, the work is more complicated.

 

We must also consider whether the work involved is worth doing. Are there a lot of people who want such an option? Is this an option they actually want, or is this something being requested because they really want something else we won't offer, and consider this a halfway measure even if it doesn't actually satisfy them? By "worth doing", after all, I mean "worth the programming time that could be spent on something more important". Even if your estimation of "two days work at most" is correct (which I rather doubt, but let's assume), we are never in a situation where programmers are sitting around looking for extra work to do, particularly when it comes to a game with a new engine. "Triage" is a term that we use to weigh such work, where we weigh bugs and tasks and decide where our effort is better spent because we simply cannot do it all. Many "nice to have" things drop off the list out of necessity because we must focus on the "must have" and "absolutely critical" stuff first.

 

So we could look at a toggle for icons, decide it would indeed be nice to have, and still not include it. Such things must justify their addition, not justify why they won't be added. That's not how development works.

[David Gaider]

I like the wheel/s and dialogue icons just fine, but sometimes I felt the paraphrases were...not as useful as they could be. Do you think they're a bit more fine-tuned this time around? To more accurately indicate what's to be said?

 

I know that you wouldn't intentionally release a product that's confusing....but DA2 was a learning experience in using that sort of feature at all...trial and error and all...do you feel that there's been a fair improvement in that area?

 

Yes, for three main reasons:

 

1) We'll have more time to test them. More eyes on the paraphrases means more catching of the awkward ones.

 

2) We no longer have choice options breaking out into three different lines, based on dominant tone. The issue with that was basically that we needed to differentiate between the three lines as much as possible, and that thus made it difficult to match a paraphrase to all three. I think we chalked that up to "nice idea, but not worth the trouble to refine further".

 

3) We're no longer anal about not having words/phrases repeated between paraphrase and actual line. Originally we attempted to have the paraphrase and actual line flow together, as if you could have them read out loud and still sound OK, and worried about any repetitiveness. We dropped that. A word repeated is fine, and if the real line is short enough (and the intent in it is clear) the paraphrase might be the full line and not need paraphrasing at all.

 

Is that going to eliminate all incidents of misalignment? Of course not, but then again no dialogue system can, as it is never one-size-fits-all.

[Allan Schumacher]

Just to add, game development could be, in many ways, consisting mostly of "not very large tasks" that numbers in the 1000+.

 

So while yes, "two days at tops" may be accurate to implement something like this, it means two days not spent working on something else.  It could be 4 things that are "half a day at tops" that get lost.

[John Epler]

This is a very important option that we have been asking for a long time Allan so it is not a triviality and I think many people want this.

 

There are a dozen features -I- want that aren't making it into the final game.

 

There are a dozen features every single dev on this project wants that aren't making it into the final game.

 

Not to come across as too much of a jerk, but development is not a democracy. I also take any request prefaced with 'many people' or 'test it to get a more correct result' with a grain of salt, as the former is vague about -who-, and the latter suggests that any option that isn't the one you want is not the correct one.

 

I'm not discounting that a number of people want it. However, all features take time, and we need to be very careful about how we allocate programming and testing resources.

[Allan Schumacher]

That to me is what some (note I did not say all) dialogue should be like. Forcing you to choose based on something other than tone. Like the actual words that were there.

 

This is the case.