Blueprint Dialogue System

[Grogger]

Just picked this up five minutes ago. Hopefully my time with it goes well.

Best of luck, please let me know if you encounter any issues, I'll be glad to help
(check out the video tutorials and documentation for more info if you haven't spotted them yet)

[HInoue]

One quick question about functionality if you don't mind- does this have built-in support for switching between matinee and dialogue on the fly, as in "Display line 1. once the user closes the dialog box play this cutscene until the NPC finishes crossing the room, then pause matinee and display lines 2-5"?

[Grogger]

One quick question about functionality if you don't mind- does this have built-in support for switching between matinee and dialogue on the fly, as in "Display line 1. once the user closes the dialog box play this cutscene until the NPC finishes crossing the room, then pause matinee and display lines 2-5"?

Unfortunately not. This is something I attempted to add, but Matinee had seemed uncooperative, I could not find a nice extendible way to do this.

As far as I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong), matinee sequences can only communicate events to the level blueprint, and matinee sequences require a class variable to interact with them through blueprint. You can extend each specific dialogue component for custom matinee sequences if you wish and have the matinee sequences continue the dialogue flow once complete, but this will be mostly custom work.

P.S. If anyone has any ideas on interacting with matinee like this, I would love to hear them!


Edit: To clarify my idea, each matinee sequence would need a custom dialogue function (you can't pass a matinee actor reference as a string parameter), and the matinee sequences would return events to your level blueprint. On receiving a 'Finished' event from the sequence, you would then continue the dialogue flow with the SetState function (you will need a reference to the actor containing the component in the level blueprint)

[HInoue]

Thanks for the reply, I've never been able to figure out an extensible solution either, so I was hoping you had- I'll post back if I ever work out something really workable.

[HInoue]

One more quick question if you don't mind- thumbing through the docs this looks pretty focused on blueprint components- I love the look, and I like the ton of formatting and functionality it has, but because my game uses mostly procedural dialogue generated in C++, I would need to get this system to accept a series of TArray<FString> for dialogue, and TArray<questionStruct> for responses. Would it be reasonably easy to re-wire your system to accept dialogue in that format from a single central manager class, or would the work I would need to put into changes be better-served building a UMG UI from the ground up?

[Grogger]

One more quick question if you don't mind- thumbing through the docs this looks pretty focused on blueprint components- I love the look, and I like the ton of formatting and functionality it has, but because my game uses mostly procedural dialogue generated in C++, I would need to get this system to accept a series of TArray<FString> for dialogue, and TArray<questionStruct> for responses. Would it be reasonably easy to re-wire your system to accept dialogue in that format from a single central manager class, or would the work I would need to put into changes be better-served building a UMG UI from the ground up?

Hi HInoue,

If you value your time here on earth, I recommend to never implement a complex dialogue system in UMG and Blueprints! :P

Your data can be adapted for the system in a few different ways, it would be a matter of changing 2 or 3 overridable functions in an inherited BPC_Dialogue class:

The text is retrieved through an overridable 'TArray<FDialogueItem> GetDialogueItem(FName textKey)' and 'TArray<FName> GetDialogueRowNames' functions, if you can convert your data to fit DialogueTableItem (a blueprint structure, so the converter must be in blueprints) and either change the 'GetNextState' function and ignore the GetDialogueRowNames function, or implement the GetDialogueRowNames.

Let me know if you run into any trouble if you follow this route

[HInoue]

Thanks for the feedback! I'll let you know if I end up with anything super-neat using this route

[paingate]

Just bought this and it works great. Had a frame rate drop, but thankfully I read the earlier post to turn down the max trace radius on the scanner. Not sure if that's a safe shippable fix... perhaps custom collision channels would put less of a strain on the trace hits? Seemed like when I got to an area with lots of characters walking around, the scanner chugged the frame with at least a 25ms drop. You know the system way better than me, just letting you know it might be an issue in a final level with lots of npc folks walking around.

I'm another person putting in a request for game pad support ...please and thank you

So far this is a really robust and complete system. I can't wait to see more tutorials, cause I'm well aware I have not done half of what the system is capable of doing, yet. Definitely happy with my purchase! Thank you Grogger!

[Brum_]

Hey Grogger!

Will you be adding 4.9 support for your plug-in anytime soon ?
I'll be starting my project this or the next week, and we're planning on working with the 4.9 version.
Would be nice if we could include it in the new engine version ^^

Thanks in advance
-Bram

[Grogger]

...Not sure if that's a safe shippable fix... perhaps custom collision channels would put less of a strain on the trace hits?

Hi Paingate, that would probably help, though I was hoping to avoid that so there wouldn't be an additional step in the setup or in the usable actor collisions. I do have ideas in mind for fixing this, though I haven't tested them yet.

I'm another person putting in a request for game pad support ...please and thank you

Noted!

So far this is a really robust and complete system. I can't wait to see more tutorials, cause I'm well aware I have not done half of what the system is capable of doing, yet. Definitely happy with my purchase! Thank you Grogger!

Thank you! Hopefully I find the time to make more soon!

Hey Grogger!

Will you be adding 4.9 support for your plug-in anytime soon ?
I'll be starting my project this or the next week, and we're planning on working with the 4.9 version.
Would be nice if we could include it in the new engine version ^^

Thanks in advance
-Bram

Hey Bram,

I do have time allocated for the dialogue system coming up, and I will be updating the system then (likely with some new features, unless everything goes horribly wrong).
That being said, I have tested the 4.8 version in 4.9 and it went very smoothly: everything worked, so I would say it's safe to start your 4.9 project with the 4.8 version

Let me know if you encounter any issues in 4.9 and I'll be sure to re-prioritize my schedule!

[paingate]

I'm having a hard time setting up portraits. I tried to use the one you provided as a test but I seem to be missing something because it doesn't show up. Screenshot below:



Another question...is it possible to move and resize the text field in the umg widget? Was not having much luck with that either.

[Grogger]

I'm having a hard time setting up portraits. I tried to use the one you provided as a test but I seem to be missing something because it doesn't show up.

The SetPortrait won't currently work in PreAction, it will be overwritten by the Speaker's portrait (in this case, the Speaker attributes for NPC_Power).
You can use SetPortrait inline to easily work around this (eg. in the Text field: "{SetPortrait("Groggeroo_Talking")}I'm sure of it... etc.")

Another question...is it possible to move and resize the text field in the umg widget? Was not having much luck with that either.

The text is populated in the WrapBox "wbTextArea" (contained within a scrollbox), as long as that control exists, there should be no other restrictions. The scroll box is probably nice to keep around, but the responses don't need to be contained with it.

[paingate]

Thanks for the quick response! Tried it over lunch and it worked like a charm. I read that section of the help file regarding SetPortrait getting stomped in the Preaction field but I saw that the sample file had it there so I gave it a shot. Is there another spot I can set the portrait? You mention the speaker attributes...does that mean i can assign a portrait to the actor? If so, where does that live?

[Grogger]

Thanks for the quick response! Tried it over lunch and it worked like a charm. I read that section of the help file regarding SetPortrait getting stomped in the Preaction field but I saw that the sample file had it there so I gave it a shot. Is there another spot I can set the portrait? You mention the speaker attributes...does that mean i can assign a portrait to the actor? If so, where does that live?

The speaker attributes are what is references in the SpeakerId field. It's so you don't need to set the default portrait, name, or response behaviour everytime. I go over it briefly in the video here.

[potassiumfrog]

Hey Grogger! Can your system deal with multiple languages, selected at game start?
Thanks,
Colin