Conversations Online

[MDenham]

Out of curiosity, exactly what changes would Strife need to support co-op anyhow? Will it require a complete overhaul of the QuestItem system, or...?

I'm sure hub movement can't be any more painful than Hexen, but that can't be the problem... hmm.

I so want to trash the Programmer's fortress with a buddy now.

I think the only addition besides this fix might be the addition of co-op starts.

I'm probably wrong, though.

[Karate Chris]

Hexen works because it's actually in Hexen format, which is more powerful then the Doom format, which Strife is in.

[Graf Zahl]

Hexen works because it doesn't have a mission status to track - and of course if it did it had much more powerful means than Strife. Strife went the cheapest way possible and it's amazing that it worked at all considering the nonsense the developers came up with instead of thinking their game through before starting development.

[Slasher]

Hexen works because it's actually in Hexen format, which is more powerful then the Doom format, which Strife is in.

Whoa wait a minute, Strife is in Doom format? Wow, I always thought it used Hexen format or better, since it had things like hubs, NPCs and more advanced scripting and such...

[Graf Zahl]

- Hubs don't depend on the map format. They are a completely different layer in the game organization
- Strife's NPCs are done with very little coding. In essence they are just monsters that don't chase the player and don't attacke by themselves.
- There is no 'advanced' scripting. All that is there are those dialogs and the way they are done is utterly primitive and barely touches the surface of the engine's capabilities. All they can do is give and take items to the player's inventory.

[Slasher]

Ok so there's nothing truly advanced at all about the game? It could all have been done just as easily in Doom if they'd thought of it and wanted to?

Speaking of the Strife conversation scripts, I looked at the syntax and code and stuff for making them once and I got extremely confused, really quickly. I have a project that I'm hoping to come up with an efficient NPC system and I was hoping I could do it all with ACS and some DECORATE stuff for the actors in question. The only thing that's troubling me with it is how can the game recieve your input. I was wondering how feasible it would be to implement some way for the engine to accept some kind of input, like if an NPC gives you 4 options to choose in conversation, maybe buttons 1 - 4 could be used to select your choice or something... I don't know. But so far it doesn't look possible through the existing commands.

Just curious as to how much work this kind of thing would take. Because if it could be implemented, I think it would solve most if not all NPC interaction problems...

[Blzut3]

{Stuff about KSSC being confusing}

Because certainly no one ever thought about making a GUI program before.

[Graf Zahl]

And if it was working it might be interesting. Too bad that it doesn't even start up for me.

[Slasher]

Well that's an interesting program, but can it only make stuff for Strife? Because my project is for Doom 2 and that's what I'd need it used in.

Wouldn't this only be as powerful as the original Strife dialog scripts? Only able to give or take items from the player's inventory?

My idea was to make it possible to use ACS stuff so we wouldn't need to use these dialog scripts. With ACS we could make some very powerful things happen.

I just wanted to know what the devs think about the feasibility of implementing a way for ACS or something to receive numeric input for selecting choices, or if necessary, just a way to scroll up and down through the choices like you do through the options of the Doom menu...

[Graf Zahl]

There's a nice article in the Wiki how to combine both.

[Slasher]

There's a nice article in the Wiki how to combine both.

Combine ACS and the Strife Dialog Scripts? Well now there's a good idea. Can you link to it?


EDIT: Never mind I think I found the link myself. Sounds interesting but I'd have to mess around with it for a while before I can really see how powerful it could be.

[Nash]

The KSSC wiki pages are seriously out of date and very unorganized. It definitely doesn't work for users who want to use KSSC version 3, which uses a totally different syntax.

I really want to redo the whole documentation one day and remove all traces of KSSC prior to version 3 so that everyone follows one standard... I just haven't had the time to...

In the mean time, hehmap is a very old example I made awhile back that was supposed to demonstrate various ZDoom modding features, including Strife scripts and their integration with ACS. Unfortunately it's based on KSSC 1.2 so you can only recompile my dialogues with KSSC 1.2 and nothing else.

[Slasher]

I don't really know anything about creating the Strife dialog scripts. I'm familiar with ACS which is why I was hoping to avoid the other entirely and use only ACS stuff to achieve NPC conversations and events. As I type this I'm testing some scripts that I think might allow me to make choices using ACS, and so far it works (sort of) but it has some flaws. That's why I was hoping to hear from somebody like Graf as to how possible it would be to implement certain Strife dialog actions, (freezing the game during conversations, ability to scroll through choices similar to the menu, that kind of thing) and see what he thought about it. I haven't seen this KSSC 3.0 I guess, since you claim that this isn't it.

I'll keep working on my script and see if I can't get it to work acceptably.

[Blzut3]

Well that's an interesting program, but can it only make stuff for Strife? Because my project is for Doom 2 and that's what I'd need it used in.

It can make stuff for Doom2 you just need to make your own config. I don't believe it should be too hard to figure out.

@Graf: Have you updated to the latest JRE (version 1.6)? 99% of the time that solves the problem.