VOID PROFIT Devlog #8: Authored Dialogue

A massive overhaul of the dialogue system has been implemented.

A more natural dialogue system

Before this change dialogue was constructed from different lines based on world, player and market states. As the variety of states changed, this dialogue was starting to feel extremely unnatural. Appending, prepending and inserting lines into the NPC dialogue turned into nothing but a series of dialogue snippets stitched together (which it was).

Now the system has been changed. The dialogue is now entirely authored for almost all cases. The game now decides the best line that needs to be pulled from several dialogue assets based on the same conditions as before. This creates a fully natural feeling to the dialogue.

Faction identity is now real

Using this cleaner, bigger method to show dialogue leads to a MUCH stronger faction identity. Different factions now feel completely different as they can easily react to the world and player in a way that is authored for that specific faction.

Changes:

• Added authored faction-specific dialogue
• Docking, Job and Interception dialogue is fully written and no longer constructed from conditional snippets
• Big code changes to how dialogue is fetched and shown to the player (this is more of a code improvement that should be mentioned and shouldn’t really affect the moment-to-moment gameplay)