Conversation Contemplation

Before getting into the coding of the conversation, I had to address a complaint of the second episode. The problem there is that a lot of people didn’t want to have to wait for the text to finish showing. I was aware of the problem before releasing the second episode, but wanted to get the episode released so hadn’t bothered to come up with a solution. My original solution was to have a fast forward button within the dialog box that would speed up the rate at which the text appeared when the button was down. When I decided that I better implement the conversation speedup, I decided that a better approach would be to simply skip the slow display of the text. One advantage of the second approach was it was easier to implement then speeding up the text. Quite simply, I have a quick text button in the dialog bubble. If the button is pressed, it automatically adjusts the length of the shown text to be the full length of the text to be displayed.

If you wanted to have a fast forward for the text, you would have to handle things a bit differently. Instead of dealing with the button released, you would have to handle the mouse or button being down. When it was down, you would simply have more than one character added at a time. How many characters get added to the output string every cycle would be based on how fast you wanted the fast-forward to speed up the display of text.

With the conversation bubble out of the way, we can now focus on the conversation itself. There are two main ways that the conversation could be handled. Treating each peace of the conversation as a separate room or algorithmically handling the conversation. Both involve breaking the conversation into a bunch of states. With the room method, you actually go to a specific frame that holds the segment of the conversation you wish to show. With the algorithmic method, one scene handles the whole conversation, with code determining what text to show.

Both methods are pretty similar. Having the conversation handled through code that is all on one page, however, is probably the better approach simply because it makes it easier to change the conversation.