Any tutorials on using the conversation editor? I've been playing with it for half an hour and still have absolutely no idea on how to use it.

No tuts that I know of or have seen around here. I've been using it pretty extensively to build my new companion and have put almost 200 lines of dialogue into it for her quest so far. I'm not sure I'm using it to its full potential though.

This is what I can tell you that I've figured out messing around with it and have picked up from the couple of comments dropped on us by the devs here in a couple of threads:

1) You can't get anything into the editor until you've created something in a quest.
2) Once you have a topic to build under you can open it up in the editor with the Load Dialogue pop up. Choose your NPC and the Quest you have made. I couldn't get anything to load the first time unless I only chose the second of the Advanced Options, but later I found using both Advanced Options got me everything I had in my quest. I now use both all of the time.
3) To reuse topics you can go to a topic you want to reuse and right click on it and choose copy and then go to the blue dot of the place where you want to reuse it and choose Paste as Link.
4) To add a new topic under another one right click and add as child. This is how you continue to build dialouge. That new topic will be added into your quest automatically. This is what makes the editor so great. That and you can easily read all of your dialogue in one place all laid out for you.

If you have any other questions ask and I may be able to answer it.

:) llama

llamaRCA pointed this out to me a couple of weeks ago. I have alternated between using this and using the regular quest editor. Neither of them makes it "easy", but both of them make it "possible". A couple of annoying things about the conversation editor: the topic names it generates by default are too long to read in the topics tab, so once you start using it for a particular quest it's hard to edit using the topics tab. Also it renames the topics when you add more, so if you knew something about topic 019 before, it might be 020 after you edit. So there are some quests I have entered completely with the convo editor, and some I have entered completely with the topics tab, and I never mix the two styles when working on a single quest.

One thing the conversation editor is better at, is reordering replies. I have a topic with six possible replies, many of which are conditional, but I want them to appear in a certain order. Now I want to add a new possible reply at position 3. Without the convo editor, I need to delete topics 3-6, add my new one and then re-add the four I deleted. With the convo editor I can add it at the bottom and then carefully use "move topic up" to move it into position.

Most of where I seem to spend my time is debugging the after conditions of multiple topics. I feel like both the convo editor and the topics tab give me a tiny porthole to look through, so I can only see one tiny piece of the puzzle at a time. If anybody can find a better way I'd love to know.

You can make the column wider if you need to in order to view the entire name. It doesn't stay wider between sessions, but it's helpful during that session. You can also rename them if you don't like the name its been given.



Hmm. I haven't noticed this (renaming). I mix and match a lot. I find some things are easier added in a Quest (single lines that my NPC will be saying) and other things are much easier added in the Conversation Editor (entire conversations).



I agree. This is very handy.



Do you mean checking what you've done in results scripts?

Some good advice. I've been having trouble with the adding dialogue too, and I'd have to say someone should make a tutorial someday. It would be very helpful.

With the old editor, you can use the right and left arrow keys to move the choices up/down in the list and order them the way you want, without deleting any of them from the list. The same with topics that have multiple info's below them.

@ llamaRCA, in the quest topics tab, the choices window is not horizontally resizeable. This is the main one I cannot read. I have to hover the mouse to see the name. Although I can move column dividers for the topic list on the left, the listbox itself is not resizeable. So I usually have to choose between either seeing the editor ID, or the text.

@ rickerhk, thanks for the tip about left/right arrow keys to reorder topics in the "Choices" window. , I never would have thought of that, but it works great.

Perhaps it is because I am not an expert yet, but I continually write the wrong quest stage number (off by one) into the result script window, causing the quest to make itself unsolvable. These are my bugs, but if I could see more of the things I want on screen at the same time, it would be easier to check as I go along. Other games I have modded had more of a language based approach, rather than strictly GUI; so I could review an entire module of the design at once in a text editor.

Oh, ya, you're right about that. It is very inconvenient and a good argument for a brief Quest ID. That's one of the reasons I spend a lot more time doing what I can in the Conversation Editor. I find problem solving in there pretty easy. Most things that go wrong for me in testing that are based in dialogue results scripts are rapidly found in the Conversation Editor because big chunks of dialogue can be seen at one time. I don't memorize the topic IDs but do remember where I am controlling things within the conversations I've created. It's only a couple of clicks on a line of dialogue to get to the results script. It works well for me. I also find it pretty easy to implement changes throughout my quest (in results scripts) when I can see all the dialogue on the same page.

I do this in the topic editor, but maybe that is what you mean by conversation editor?

(right and left arrow move them?)

But if so, I have never seen the automatic topic renaming you mentioned.

The conversation editor is different from the quest topic tab. The conversation editor is invoked by the rightmost button in the main toolbar, which looks like lines of right aligned text. I have found that if I enter a conversation using this, then go back and add topics in the middle using this, many of the topics it added are renumbered. This is not fatal, but combined with the really long topic names it generates, it makes using the quest topic editor to fine-tune quite difficult.

Maybe just maybe llamaRCA could write a tutorial for all :hubbahubba:

bigcrazewolf

I second that, I appreciate the tips!

I was very familiar with the old quest editor, still a little intimidated by the new one - but havn't spent enough time in it yet to say really.

Thanks!

Miax