Please help with Dialogue system

[JMC002 Neil]

I'm new to these forums, so Hello to everybody!

I came across Adventure Maker recently and was immediately interested. I have been using the freeware version for a few days and believe that I understand how it works and what can be achieved. I am very impressed and am already considering purchasing the full version. I have some experience of programming and like very much the idea of being able to use VB script and plugins to extend the functionality of the software.

First, though, I have two questions regarding the way that dialogue is handled in Adventure Maker, when using the Dialogue Wizard. I have read the help documents and searched this forum but cannot find much relevant information. Any assistance would be appreciated.

1) Is there any way to prevent interaction with "the world" whilst in a conversation? I would like to prevent the user from clicking on anything - including leaving the frame - except the dialogue options ("questions"). The only way I can think of to achieve this so far is to have a non-clickable hotspot, called when the first question appears, that sets a variable that hides all of the hotspots, and a second non-clickable hotspot that is called at the end of the conversation to reset the variable to reactivate the hotspots. Is there a simpler, better way?

2) It is easy to configure dialogue options to affect the game world by getting them to use hotspots. However, I can see no way for anything in the game world to affect a conversation, either before the conversation starts, or during it. An example of affecting the conversation before it starts is to add or remove dialogue options based on whether a variable is set to a particular value, e.g. the option to offer a coin only appears if the user has the coin. An example of affecting the conversation while it is ongoing would be ending the conversation if the user clicks a certain hotspo (or hotspots), e.g. the user clicks a button that somehow kills the person they're talking to, or the user leaves the frame.

I hope that all makes sense!

[Lyberodoggy]

Hello, Welcome to the Forums

You can try several tweaks that can be found in the Forums for the Dialogue System.
To disable the environment during Dialogues, you can disable all hotspots before entering a dialogue using vbs. Hope this helps...

[JMC002 Neil]

To disable the environment during Dialogues, you can disable all hotspots before entering a dialogue using vbs. Hope this helps...

Thanks for the prompt reply! I realise that I can disable the hotspots, even without using vbs. I think that a simple variable check in each hotspot would do it. I just wondered if there was a simpler, more "global" method to disable interaction with the game world whilst in conversations.

[GM-Support]

I just wondered if there was a simpler, more "global" method to disable interaction with the game world whilst in conversations.

There is no specific feature of the dialog wizard to disable interaction, but if you create one single very large hotspot that covers the whole frame and that is on top of all the other hotspots, it should prevent the player from clicking the underlying hotspots. Alternatively, you can duplicate the frame and use a non-interactive copy of the frame to display the dialog wizard on, but I guess this is not what you want.

[JMC002 Neil]

if you create one single very large hotspot that covers the whole frame and that is on top of all the other hotspots, it should prevent the player from clicking the underlying hotspots

Excellent idea! Thanks!