Dialog System – Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

In 2019 s.o.t.f. is still one of my favourite p&c-games. The big portraits of the persons that open up while starting a conversation gave me the feeling that the persons are real. Game interface and appearance of the characters narrow down to what is important during a conversation.

I also liked the fact that you can choose the topics which you are interested in. You could easily distinguish the new topics (the ones that haven´t been clicked so far) from the old topics colored in dark grey.

I would be very thankful about any hint that explains how to build such a thing! 

Greets Damiano

You would have to make it yourself with interfaces. Portrait part with button per character containing static images/animations for the portraits. Button per option line. You could use display object texts to link the relevant option to the relevant button. Use values/conditions to determine which display object text to display/color variant, etc.

Alternatively you could do it all with Lua & the Lua draw system & create rect polygon area based on the length/height of the option text - Sebastian would probably use this method, as it would be complicated to setup/write, but would probably save a lot of time in the long run.

It's a shame the default dialog system doesn't have a built in method for setting the state of a dialog option, to set it to "read".

I think the first method could be sufficient because i have a small game with ounly 2 scenes. And i have no experience in writing code. 

It's a shame the default dialog system doesn't have a built in method for setting the state of a dialog option, to set it to "read".

Yep. I haven´t worked with Visionaire for a long time now. A surprise that this isn´t possible so far.

The interface where the buttons/lines are placed was also a fullscreen filling area, so that the player couldn't click anywhere else beside the text areas.