Fools Rush In - Part Five

Let's finish fleshing out the plan:

The whole point of the exercise is to try and implement some of the techniques in Freeman's book, Creating Emotion in Games, so we're going to need dialogue. A brief look at the theory implies that the Unreal II dialogue system is very powerful indeed, if somewhat unwieldy to write the code for. Suspicions are raised by one overiding factor: they didn't use it to it's full potential in the game. The conversations were simple, linear and compulsory for the most part with little in the way of optional approaches or complex interactions. Unless I missed something, of course.

This could mean a couple of things. Maybe the Unreal II dialogue was written as the system was developed and therefore never got complex enough to test out its full potential. Or maybe it doesn't work reliably. There were a few systems in Deus Ex that had bits of code present but utterly failed to work in game, probably because they couldn't get it working properly in time to use it. We're probably going to have to do some extensive testing and experimentation before we commit to writing a whole bunch of dialogue that won't work the way we want it to. In any case, we'll put the major NPC's dialogue files in the plan:

We also need to include some time for experimentation, so we'll rough out the kinds of things we think we'll need:

Next is the AI scripting.

Hand in hand with the dialogue is the scripting that will tell the NPCs where to go and when and what to do when they get there. Each NPC and the bad guys too, will need a script file to schedule their orders.

As we get to the end of the plan we can deal with the 'icing' bits that will make our mod look a bit more professional and hopefully get more people to play it.

We had mixed luck with the voicing of the Cassandra script, but it's probably worth doing as it adds so much more than plain subtitles on the screen.

And finally we need to figure out how we're going to get all these files we create together in a form that will be easily transferable and distributed to people who'd might like to play it.

The full plan looks like this: