Re: [Adonthell-general] Dialog engine and Fame (Was: Re: New map engine implementation started! :))

[Kai Sterker]

On 08 Feb 2002 14:48:40 +0100 Alexandre Courbot wrote
> 
>> I'm currently fighting with rpm, but I'll go back to coding soon. Am just
>> a bit unsure what to do: improve the dialogue system or schedules, or do
>> some work on the item/combat/magic front.
> 
> The schedules are fine for now, I'd say - better to improve them once we
> have something else to move with (i.e the New Ass Kicking Map System).

Right. Basically the only thing that I would add would be sort of a
'schedule manager' for each NPC, that would chose the schedule to use
according to the time of the day or other events in the game world, making
NPC's even more active. But that can wait 'till after v0.4.
 

> About the dialogs, you might want to to improve them a bit after reading
> what follows.
> 
> I had a discussion with my local LUG's president because he's very
> interested in dlgedit and the dialog engine in general. He's currently
> working into a European program to get Free Software more used in
> education - and what interests him in the dialog engine is that it's
> capable to remind what the user said and did to propose him relevant
> sentences. From what I understood (I might be a bit wrong there) he'd
> like to plug it into an existing web-based scholar program, as an help
> system and others things, which would be technically very possible and
> simple.

Hm, I never thought at stuff like that, but it might be possible.
 
> After having a look at the game and the editors, he is very enthousiast
> about it - and it might well be that he'll use it. But for this purpose
> he'd need the dialog engine to be internationalized. 

What exactly needs to be internationalized? The program (dlgedit) itself? 
Or the output. I imagine latter is what he would want :). Possibly in a
fashion that makes multiple language versions available at the same time,
and choses the right one according to the users preferences, right?

Basically, such a feature would be useful for us as well, if we want to
have international versions of Adonthell. 


> I'm talking about this only now (discussions started about two weeks
> ago) because chances are that it will happen. Discussions are going on,
> and the dialog engine really seems to be what they need (especially
> dlgedit which is a very handy tool - actually it's thanks to it that the
> dialog engine might be reused). Moreover, as I said, it's totally
> independant of the rest of the game, so pluging it somewhere else is
> really no problem. Internationalizing would IMO be best done by using
> gettext and .po file - have to check here how much Python likes gettext.
> This is anyway something we would have done soon or later, I think - and
> not so hard, I believe. Maybe you'll want to throw a look at this
> direction, Kai.

Well, I can have a look in that direction. Please keep me informed.
 
 
> The moral is, when you develop an engine of any sort, never forget to
> provide good and user friendly tools to create data for it, or you might
> miss good opportunities! (see
> http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/screenshot/closeup.shtml?9 , I hate you,
> Kai! ;))

Well, if you want that shot removed, you'll have to write a good map editor 
for v0.4. Consider it a measure to get your motivation up ;).


Apart from that, further "improvements" to dlgedit I had in mind where a
code cleanup (convert it to proper C++), improvements to the user
interface, allowing modular dialogues, etc. pp. 

Kai