First Person Conversations

A refuge for those migrating from the fallen DXEditing.com and a place for general discussion relating to Deus Ex editing (coding, mapping, etc).
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Cybernetic pig
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First Person Conversations

Post by Cybernetic pig »

I'd like there to be an option to have conversations that would usually be in third person to be in first person instead. Fiddling around it seems it shouldn't be too difficult to do. Mostly everything is already supported except:

-Drawing the dialogue options window and everything associated to it: it'd have to be different (1-4 keys to choose dialogue option as in, say, VtM:B) unless we rob control from the player, as the mouse is usually used to select dialogue options.
-If the player leaves the immediate area/radius, have NPCs wait on the player to return. Either that or rob control from the player (how most games do it and how it is already done in DX third person).
-Accounting for general variation of events and scripting - there is likely to be something unexpected to come up.

Other than that, everything seems to be golden, although this is only based on a little fiddling and testing.

Is there any insight one could provide? Any ideas why it shouldn't be attempted? Anyone that would be interested in helping me attempt it? Any ideas why the devs chose third person conversations when all LGS Immersive Sims were exclusively first person and very effectively so?
Hanfling
MJ12
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Re: First Person Conversations

Post by Hanfling »

If the player leaves the immediate area/radius, have NPCs wait on the player to return
Well if you just pause the conversation, you block all other conversations. And canceling conversations in the middle is no good idea either as you could skip in middle of conversations where just certain flags get set, etc. which can cause other problems for dialogues as conversations were assumed to be atomic. And if you cancel the conversation you would have to add some kind of resume system (could be done, i still need to do that to account for players leaving during a 3rd person conversation in HX, unless i handle it different, like dumb playing the conversation to the end, but i'm unsure how to go ahead with choices.).

So if you really want to move things forward to 1st person conversations, you should probably split down longer conversations into smaller chunks. Change order around a bit (like for the selections) and when flags get set to make sure it runs correct for partially dialogues. But this requires an huge amount of testing to ensure that gameplay stays in order and you doesn't get plenty of bugs due to parts of conversations skipped.

Btw. for keys for dialogue options you should probably use key kombination like crtl+1-4.
I demand my DXE User ID back. Launcher for DeusEx, Rune, Nerf, Unreal & Botpack. HX on Mod DB. Revision on Steam.
Cybernetic pig
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Re: First Person Conversations

Post by Cybernetic pig »

Robbing control is the realistic option, really. It is how it is vanilla anyway.

Hmm...robbing control from the player wouldn't be ideal for conversations involving more than two characters, unless we rotate the player to face whoever is talking.

I don't want to change the conversation system beyond what is necessary to do to get it working as in VtM:B, Ultima Underworld & New Vegas etc, and it would be an option toggleable in the menu to choose between first/third.
machina
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Re: First Person Conversations

Post by machina »

What about infolinks with conversation options? If you make it an infolink (text on top of screen instead of bottom) you could make the player and NPCs walk around or be in a firefight during the convo or do anything. You'd just have to add something that automatically ends the conversation if the player walks too far away from the source. Only unrealistic thing would be the voice volume not becoming lower as you walk away. Conversation options could still be at the bottom of the screen if you want to make them more noticeable.
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