The Weird West side project (called Overdrive) that I started working on some time back is something I rarely find the time to advance, despite having a lot of ideas about, but lately I have a little bit. The other day I smashed out a conversation system!
I really love the result (video below) – I want to get some gesticulations and walking-around support in there, but it’s otherwise where it needs to be, aesthetically and ease-of-use-wise. Easily writing scripts that then automagically become convincing-enough conversations between npcs/the player is such a pleasure.
This is a custom implementation of the excellent SUDS, a free Unreal plugin for a text-based approach to scripting dialogue. It parses scripts into a state machine situation, but you still have to do your own implementation into your game, unless you go for the less-work more-opinionated paid version, which I prefer not to. I’ve used SUDS on a few different projects, and I love how flexible it is: here I’ve set up a system using that uses event names to let you tell each character where to look during the dialogue. So the script looks like this:
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.