Blueprint Dialogue System

[Grogger]

@crossmr

Is there someway to get the dialog to pause so I can pop up a widget and enter a value? After a player makes a choice, I need it to pop up a widget and take a text input (or I’m going to use arrows to let them scroll, we’ll see) but basically I need the dialog to pause while that’s done. When they close it I want the dialog to continue.

There is no built in way to store dialogue state and resume after some kind of event and there are many ways to go about this (partially why I didn’t implement it). One simple way to go about it would be to separate the ‘resumed’ dialogue in another branch, and when the dialogue pausing, it can update the ‘initial branch’ to be the resuming branch. Of course you can code your own systems using custom dialogue script functions and script variables as well.

@crossmr

I’m finding the documentation/examples around conditions to be somewhat…unhelpful. The documentation just has vague explanations without much detail and the example doesn’t seem to have any real conditions in it. Just one row has a condition of “FALSE” and that’s it. Is there a working example that shows how to pull a variable from somewhere to check something as a condition? You gave an example earlier of something like this working:

But with no real context as to how to call it.

After a bunch of trial and error it seems like I should set an initial branch of some kind of “randbranch” selector that will go through all the greetings and then pick one based on conditions. But then I found out further issues. For example if I set that on the post action, it never runs. I have to set it on the pre-action of the item they choose (story/system). I set up a function to print all the keys from the variables to verify it and they won’t run. I can’t find anywhere to run it on “exit” at all, since my exit just closes out the dialog. Pre-action of exit, post action of greeting, nothing. there seems to be no way to clearly run it there.

I basically have to do it like this, which is fine if you have a couple options, but if I have 10 options on the initial dialog, it needs to be set in 10 different entries.
Nothing else causes it to actually run and register. Why isn’t post-action running on my hub?

The condition column is called automatically whenever a branch is considered for display. If the script in that column returns true (be it a binary comparison, a variable with a boolean in it, or a hard coded true/false), the branch is eligible to display. It sounds like you were using this correctly in the second part.

The post-action should always run once the branch line is complete and there shouldn’t be an exception to this. That being said, we don’t make much use of hubs in our game so it maybe an issue that I simply haven’t encountered yet. We’re in the middle of a heavy crunch period at the moment, so I won’t be able to take a look at this just now.

I’m not sure if this works for what you’re trying to achieve, but you can have a silent initial branch that sets the visit variable and then moves on to your hub branch. Silent non-hub branches can most definitely run pre and post actions.