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This Week’s Snapshot (Milestone 2 Deliverable):
What’s New:
While the video goes over everything from my last Milestone 1 deliverable, I’ll just talk about what’s new from the last blog post.
- Two new nodes: Info and Branch
- The Info node contains information pertaining to the tree itself. This only has the speaker name right now, but can be expanded to include other media like an image of the speaker. The Info node can not be created or destroyed
- The Branch node gives this tool its name. It takes in three dialogue nodes, the question and two choices, and outputs two answers. This will be expanded to include options to add more input or output pins
- Creating a new Dialogue Tree has a default layout and nodes already set up. Currently it only contains an Info node but it will be expanded to include a working branching dialogue
Challenges:
Honestly, not a whole lot. The biggest challenge for me was just getting everything done in a timely manner. While working on it, I had a bunch of ideas and ran with them. While this made for a better product now, it meant I spent time I hadn’t planned for. But it all worked out.
What’s Next:
My next big goal is to add conditionals. This means enhancing the branching part of this tool to include stuff like if statements and other logic. Having conditionals would elevate this from a simple branching dialogue tool to something that could, theoretically, build entire cutscenes and scripted events. This is a multi week goal, and I’ll probably narrow it down in the next few days. To sum it all up:
- Add a Conditional node
- This will be the base node for any external boolean. The user will be able to define these for a tree and then externally set the values
- Add 3 logic nodes: If, Or, and And
- These nodes will add functionality to the Conditional node
- After the above is done, add the ability to modify conditional values inside of a tree. This will probably be a new node, but I don’t want to commit to anything until I see what my architecture for the entire conditional system is
- Add the ability to add more pins (inputs and outputs) to a Branch node
- Set up a good default tree so that users can get a quick start
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