What is Venn Dialog?
Venn Dialog is a system for player interaction with non-player characters. Like other dialog systems, it will support developer-defined dialog trees.
Unlike its competitors, VennDialog is designed to allow interaction with any NPC. Gone are the days of mute NPCs. VennDialog makes it easy to give each NPC something to say.
With VennDialog, every character can help to enrich the world, and provide the player with useful background information.
How Does VennDialog Work?
VennDialog allows the user to ask an NPC questions about the world. From asking them if they know about the dragon’s treasure, to asking about the latest gossip or which tavern to go to, VennDialog provides a wide range of options for players to get information from an NPC.
The core of the VennDialog Engine is the Dialog object. Each one is a tidbit of information, combined with an association and with information about who would know it.
For each question, VennDialog searches through the thousands of possible Dialogs, and selects the best one to use- based on the question, the NPC, and that NPC’s relationship to the player.
The result is an accurate, natural sounding response to any inquiry.
What Tools Does VennDialog Give Developers to Accomplish This?
VennDialog will ship with full, visual editors for each of its subsystems, requiring little to no coding to use the VennDialog Engine.
Features Include:
Creation of Dynamic, Branching Questions for Players to Ask
A Broad Range of Attributes Used to Set which NPCs know what Information
Fully Customizable Syntax, with Regional Dialects
… and other tools that will be detailed more later.
VennDialog will ship with one or more interfaces to use with the game’s GUI, and VennDialog’s development team will work closely with early adopters, to tailor the engine to their needs.
What is the Current State of VennDialog?
Currently, VennDialog is in pre-Alpha. While the main search functions are working, there’s still a lot of coding that needs to be done to get all of the core functionality of the engine working. Additionally, the Visual Editors will need to be developed before it is ready to ship.
An early Alpha, without the visual editors, should be reached by the end of 2019.