Work Post

4:04am - Well this is rather unpleasant; the McDonalds in London have closed their night dining rooms. The one near my apartment was closed and I saw a new sign with the new hours, and when I tried driving to the next nearest McDonalds it had the same sign.

I passed a Tim Hortons with an open dining room and I heard someone complain to the cashier that all the McDonalds are closed like that now. I had to drive half way across town to find someplace to work tonight. Took me an hour and a half just to get to this point.

But here I am, so I'd better make it worthwhile.

Last time I worked I made the basic data structures for containing the dialogue tree and built a sample tree in an XML file. So my next job is to make the Unity parts. I need to make a couple sprites for the text window itself, a border, a brackground, and a pointer. I need to get a font to use for my text. I need to make the dialogue window prefab in Unity. And then I need to code it all together.

I'll start with the sprites.

5:50am - Hokay I made the sprites, I found a few fonts I like, I put them all into Unity and made the text window/dialog box for the dialogue system.

6:02am - I went ahead and made the window/dialog box into a prefab so I can instantiate them as I like. Next up I have to do the code to initiate the conversation, and drive the text windows along. That's going to be a lot of work and require a bit of thought, and I think I'm too tired for that now. But two hours of making a text window prefab is pretty good I think.

Work Post

7:50pm - Well I'm trying working from home tonight, since my spine is feeling less weird, and I don't know what else to do anyway. XD

Today I'm going to try to make the dialogue system's code elements. Or at least some of them, I have a feeling this will be a multi-day stage.

8:02pm - Okay I put up an instruction text that says Press X to Chat. That's going to be my control for opening and advancing the text. The arrow keys will let you choose between options when they come up, but then you press X to continue. I'll need to modify my test xml to have proper text examples, right now it's mostly choice based, but RPG text comes in one window at a time.

8:20pm - While making the alternative text for my dialogue test I noticed a problem with the way the dialogue data structures is designed. The guy I was cribbing off of was designing for text windows that don't automatically follow up with one another. He was using dialogue options for all progression. Mine is clasic RPG style so each window should automatically have an option, but a dialogue branch should be special and different. So I'll have to modify the data structure to reflect that by having each dialogue entry have a built-in connection, and if the connection is -1 it's the end of the conversation.

8:30pm - After finagling with the data structure a bit I realized it would work better the way it is. I'll just make it so that if there's only one option the selection arrow doesn't come up, so you're automatically selecting the next option. That should work better. This data structure is pretty slick.

8:36pm - Okay I've got my dialogue file updated. Now to do the code. First an input manager to handle the keyboard input...

9:19pm - I've kinda fallen off the horse. I got the window to pop up when I press X so that's nice. I'll try to work more later. For now I'm going to get some food.