Strife/USDF/ZDSF Dialogue Management Tool

[Eliot_L]

I have been writing a lot of ZDSF dialogue for my current WAD project and I wrote this tool to address some of my biggest pain points with the format.

https://github.com/fadookie/doom-dialogue-template-tool

Currently it provides two main features:

1. Merging multiple conversations from separate files into one file with a single, customizable header. I found that one global dialogue library was getting difficult to manage as it was getting extremely long, so this helps break it up.
2. Using label tokens in place of where you would normally have to write a page index. This means you can insert pages freely inside existing conversation blocks and all the references to existing pages will update automatically.

I hope someone else finds it useful. If you have any feedback, please leave it here or open an issue on the GitHub repo. FYI, I designed this tool for my workflow which uses unpacked pk3 directories so I can just run the script and reload the folder and it will update in game. Updating DIALOGUE lumps embedded in a binary WAD is definitely out of scope at the moment.

[Dynamo]

Thanks! Always nice to see new attempts at improving the workflow for this

[Eliot_L]

Thanks! Someone on discord pointed out to me that ZSDF already supports page labels which I completely missed! If I had known that I probably wouldn't have made this tool. But it does add a few useful features like dialogue merging, and it works with vanilla USDF as well because it's a preprocessor.

[Nash]

Thanks for this. Will be watching with great interest. :)