Ideas Wanted for New Non-Linear Dialog Editor
 

Hello Everyone,

For a while I have been looking for a high quality, easy to use, non-linear dialog editor. I have seen a few attempts to make some software like this, but I don't think they ever quite reached their potential. I would like to develop some new software with the most current tools (Visual Studio, .NET 3.0, C#) to make a nice looking and functional non-linear dialog editor. I read this paper, which sparked my interesting in developing this and I am hoping to get all of your feedback on some ideas and features to add.

There has been a lot of debate and it is still common to develop some sort of dialog tree to sort out conversations, but these trees can get out of hand very quickly with too many branches to keep track of. I would ideally like to develop a system that is easy to look at and friendly for non-technical designers to write complex dialog. Here are features that I thought of, so please add your ideas below and credit will be given in the final product where it is due. Thanks so much!

• Sleek and user-friendly UI (similar to Celtx pre-production software)
• Conversation visualization as graph or tree
• Define conditions for certain dialog options to appear (e.g. never talked to this person, has a certain inventory item, etc.)
• Define how a dialog selection affects the player-NPC relationship (e.g. the NPC may become more hostile in general if poor dialog choices are selected, which affects future interactions)
• Link production files to dialog entries (e.g. audio files, lip sync files, etc.)
• Import from linear scripts and automatically generate scripted dialog for a number of game engines (we are using Wintermute)
• Conversation simulation mode to test dialog flow

Thanks again for reading!

-Ben

That sounds like an awesome tool! Let us know when you've got a working version for testing.

For visual representation ideas, you may want to take a look at Cayra, which Lee in Limbo and I have used in the past to visually plot out interactive conversations before scripting them. The main site seems to have disappeared at the moment, but I think you can still download the program here.

Thanks very much for the suggestion... I think making "mind maps" of the conversations would be excellent! I found a great control that I might be able to use: http://www.devcomponents.com/treegx/

Alpha Version Complete
 

I have been working hard the past 4 months to develop this software and I finally have an alpha version. I hope to have a public beta version in about a month or so and I would love to have people help me test the beta and come up with some example conversations. The screen shots below show some of the main features, including the "chat map" view, the "script" view, and the conversation simulator.

http://urbanbrainstudios.com/chatmap...main_alpha.jpg

http://urbanbrainstudios.com/chatmap...ript_alpha.jpg

http://urbanbrainstudios.com/chatmap...ator_alpha.jpg

Great idea! Looking forward to the beta

I'm looking forward to the beta too. I'd be happy to write example scripts for it.

Hi Guys,

I managed to assemble a small team to work on this software and we have finally released a testable beta version today!

http://www.chat-mapper.com

It is about 90% feature complete and I would love some feedback in the form of bugs and suggestions from anyone willing to test it. I could also use some example projects to package with the release version. I have set up a forum where you can give your feedback at www.chat-mapper.com/forums/ so please give your feedback there if you don't mind.

Thanks!

-Ben

Downloading now mate.

hey this is pretty cool, i have a question about this:

- Let say i make dialog like this: 1 -> 2 -> 3
- Then i make a mistake and delete dialog 2
- How can i link Dialog 3 as a child of Dialog 1 ?? so it will look like 1->3 ??

EDIT:
nevermind i figure it out, using that LINK TO DIALOG function
pretty neat program you make here benmcntsh

if you can drag around your dialog that would be cool, but i guess that will make it messy :P

This looks so amazingly useful. I'm planning on doing an interactive dialog on my blog, and when I did that in the past I needed to work it all out in Javascript. It'll be so nice to be able to write it in something more sensible first.

Right, I thought about allowing multiple selections and free dragging, but I wanted to keep it more simple and controlled for now to see how it goes.

Those are the kind of suggestions I would like to hear about! That would be great to have an export to html / Javascript feature.

I don't think that'll be necessary. It's not a common language to do this sort of thing in. I'm just looking forward to writing it out someplace legible first. That is, if I can ever install it. It had me try to download .NET, and that wouldn't install. Which isn't your fault, and there's not really anything you can do about it, but it's annoying.

I agree that it is annoying. Unfortunately independent developers with no money (like me) don't have much choice when it comes to easily making state-of-the-art user interfaces. The newest version of .NET even leverages the GPU automatically for UI graphics, which is nice.

Simple Flow Chart + SAve As JPG Request
 

Hi Ben,

Is it possible to get a simpler version to do a basic in-game flowchart like this:

http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/5638/gameflow.jpg

this should be very useful to design a puzzle for the game.
I know we can always use PowerPoint to do this, but using chat-mapper is a lot quicker since i can just click NEW CHILD to add more ASSET/CHART.

Actually the current version works fine too, however we will have bunch of field that we will never use (Actor, conversant etc). In this case what I need is just the TEXT.


FEATURE REQUEST:
1. ) How about an option to define what kind of field is needed for each ASSET / CHART ?
(We can specify this as a default option / chat-mapper will remember last option, so user don't have to check/unchecked field they don't need everytime they add new child).

Field that is optional:
- Actor (Name, Age etc)
- Conversant
- Parenthetical
- Reputation Effect
- Audio, Animation, Lipsynch
- Menu Text
- Display Duration
- etc

2.) Menu to Save All Chart as a BIG JPG file (1:1 size) with no truncation between page.
File->Save As JPG