27 réponses à ce sujet

[Kaldor Silverwand]

I guess I should have chimed in last month.  For me as someone who champions player-choice I would have loved to have developed highly personalized conversations with all kinds of checks for race, feat, class, skills, alignment, stats, etc.  I agree they can be fun and help with immersion. However, as a developer who believes  in thorough testing it would consume far too much of my time to test them. Time that is better spent, I think, developing things that every player will get some benefit or enjoyment from.  I suspect many of the bugs in NWN2 OC conversations are exactly because the developers put more personalization in than they had time to properly test.

 

Now if I was in charge of a large project team I would definitely have a person whose assignment would be to go through conversations and personalize them.  Just as I would also have a person whose assignment would be to go through developed areas and add animated characters, animals, etc.  That kind of polish though isn't really possible with a team of one.

 

Regards

[Dann-J]

One way to personalise conversations without the need for extensive testing is to simply offer conversation nodes for flavour only, that all lead to the same subsequent node.

 

I have a cloud giant in a module I'm working on who greets whoever meets him in jotunskye, using a script that analyses the speaker's major class that sets a conversation token. Different classes get slightly different greetings, but they make no difference to the conversation whatsoever. Anyone who doesn't speak cloud giant (or perhaps Norwegian) won't know what he's saying anyway!

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

Can't remember if I said this already, but custom tokens could be used to automate a lot of the flavor text in conversations.

 

For example, the first-line greeting could be a single custom token with a script attached.  The script looks at a bunch of variables, e.g. class, race, alignment, reputation, quest status, time of day, etc, and then picks a greeting out of a table to apply to that particular conversation.  When writing the npc conversation, the builder just has to fill out the table with lines appropriate to that character (i.e. what would Hilda Sackflayer say when meeting a halfling paladin at 3:00 in the morning).  The token could also be concatenated together mad-lib style to keep the the range of possibilities reasonably short.

 

After that, it's just a matter of figuring out how to interject those custom tokens into specific conversations - hello, goodbye, respond to charm, respond to intimidate, gossip about last quest, give hint to current quest, etc.  The same could be applied to the PC side of conversations as well, the PC might have 20 different ways to intimidate someone, but the player only sees the class-race-alignment appropriate options on each play-through.