Parts of Speech

The conversation system I am developing is broken into two key parts. There is the dialog and the responses. Both parts share a set of types that are used to convey the purpose of the dialog or response. These are descriptions, speech, thoughts, exclamation, whisper, and robotic.

Dialogs are used to display the actual topic. There is support for different rendering types for the appearance of the text. The thing about dialogs are that they are suppose to be strictly for displaying what a character is saying.

Responses are similar to dialogs except instead of supporting multiple lines of text, they are meant to be a single line of text to help the player decide what exactly they are going to do in the game.

Both get combined to form the topic. The dialog holding what the character is saying and the responces holding what action the player wants to take. Right now this is implemented as a simplified structure which is modified manually, though proper function calls could be added in the future.

public class ConversationTopic
{
// ***** VARIABLES ***************************************************

public var topicType:int;
public var topic:String;
public var subjectType:int;
public var subject:String;
public var text:String;
public var showQuery:String;
public var displayCommands:Array;
public var subtopics:Array;

// ***** CONSTRUCTOR *************************************************

public function ConversationTopic(
sTopic:String = "None",
sSubject:String = "No Subject",
sText:String = "This topic is about nothing",
nType:int = 1,
nSubType:int = 1,
sShowQuery:String = "ISFLAGSET TRUE",
aDisplayCommands:Array = null,
aSubtopics:Array = null )
{
topicType = nType;
topic = sTopic;
subject = sSubject;
subjectType = nSubType;
text = sText;
showQuery = sShowQuery;
displayCommands = aDisplayCommands;
subtopics = aSubtopics;
}