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--- dialogues [2020/11/06 11:56] – [Events] admin
+++ dialogues [Unknown date] (current) – removed - external edit (Unknown date) 127.0.0.1
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-====== Dialogues ======
-{{::dialogue.jpg?nolink|}}
-A huge topic in game and multimedia app development is good and none-redundant dialogue or conversation management. With Gorilla3D you have an easy-to-use component which is also able to handle complex conversations.
-===== Features =====
-  * Complex & flexible design in tree structure
-  * (Un)lockable items
-  * Crosslinking of items possible
-  * Set question, answer or floating item display time - for fast-reaction games
-  * Design of dialogues & monologues with colloquist information
-  * Multilingual system easily definable
-  * Auto-language selection
-  * Set variables to implement gaming elements
-  * Set parameters to interact back with your game/application
-  * Events for: showing text and images, playing audio, video and animations, executing method calls, property settings, redirection & more
-  * Events with different scopes: dialogue item, UI-element, gaming element
-  * Pause, stop and skip dialogues and items
-  * Storable as single or multiple dialogue files/streams (dynamic loading possible)
-  * Storeable in xml format
-  * Loadable from xml file/stream
-  * Readable and understandable xml format, to outsource design & management of dialogues.
-  * Fully customizable in Delphi
-==== DialogueDesigner ====
-We already built a helper tool for you to setup dialogues by a flow chart editor.
-  * Create dialogues, items and events simply by drag & drop
-  * Move, rearrange and delete items & events
-  * Configure every dialogue, item and event in detail
-  * Treeview for easy dialogue navigation
-  * Preview dialogues in sandbox viewer
-===== TGorillaDialogueSystem =====
-The dialogue system is the basis component for setting up and manage multiple dialogues/conversations and variables.
-Imagine the dialogue system as a hierarchy, which is able to jump between leaves (items) and execute events, to playback animations, sounds or execute scripts:
-DialogueSystem
-  - Dialogues
-      - Characters (conversation partner)
-      - Items (Textfragments of conversation)
-          - Events (do something)
-  - Variables
-To start setting up a system, a few properties are important to know:
-^Property ^Description^
-|Id|Unique id for a specific dialogue system. On creation automatically a random id will be generated, but it's possible that this id is not unique. The user should take care, that this id is unique!|
-|Language|Defines the currently used language by id. This property affects auto language map handling for items and events.|
-|Dialogues|A collection of available dialogue instances.|
-|Variables|A hashmap of <name>,<TObject> pairs. Register variables to connect another environment with the dialogue system.|
-Simply set up a dialogue system at runtime like in the following code snippet:
-<file pascal>
-uses
-  Gorilla.Utils.Dialogue.System;
-[...]
-FDialogueSys : TGorillaDialogueSystem;
-FDialogue : TGorillaDialogue;
-[...]
-// create a dialogue system on our form (its a none-visual component)
-FDialogueSys := TGorillaDialogueSystem.Create(Self);
-// create a new dialogue
-FDialogue := FDialogueSys.Dialogues.Add() as TGorillaDialogue;
-</file>
-===== Conversation (TGorillaDialogue) =====
-A TGorillaDialogue instance is a single closed conversation. So if you want to have a dialogue between character A and B this is the point to start.
-A TGorillaDialogue manages items and characters. An item can be seen as a text-fragment in your conversation but is much more. A character is a helper structure to organize your conversation. Because it's always important to know who is speaking. Besides this simple fact, a character is used as variable, which can be accessed.
-As you've seen above, you add a new dialogue by adding a collection item in the TGorillaDialogueSystem.Dialogues collection.
-In the next step we should add two characters for our conversation partners, which is also done by adding a collection item. You can of course add more than 2 characters, but to keep it simple, we'll stay here with A and B.
-<file pascal>
-FCharacterA := FDialogue.Characters.Add() as TGorillaDialogueCharacter;
-FCharacterA.Name := 'A';
-FCharacterB := FDialogue.Characters.Add() as TGorillaDialogueCharacter;
-FCharacterB.Name := 'B';
-</file>
-Once you've done that, we can start adding our text fragments.
-===== Text-Fragments (TGorillaDialogueItem) =====
-A text fragment is an entity representing a snippet of a conversation or monologue.
-In most cases its a phrase, a sentance or longer text passage spoken by a single character.
-So the main duty for setting up a conversation is to split it up the complete text into parts or so called items.
-A TGorillaDialogue and a TGorillaDialogueItem are both inherited from TGorillaDialogueParentItem, which is able to hold further sub-items. So you can to setup a hierarchy, that represents a text playback order automatically.
-<code>
-Dialogue
-    "Hello World!"
-        "How are you?"
-            "I'm fine"
-</code>
-The example above will  playback the text fragments in order:
-  - "Hello World"
-  - "How are you?"
-  - "I'm fine"
-Each item also has the possibility to register events to control the text flow.
-Those events allow the dialogue system to handle even complex conversation flow.
-What events can do for you, you can read further below.
-^Property ^Description^
-|Kind |Currently the following item kinds are supported: Question, Answer, Flow, Reference|
-|DisplayName|This value should be unique, but is managed by the user|
-|Character|Defines a linked character. If DisplayName is not set, but a character is defined, the component will return the characters name as display name.|
-|Reference|In case the kind is set to TGorillaDialogueItemKind.Reference, this property needs to be set to the DisplayName of the linked item.|
-|DisplayTime |Defines a time, for how long an item is going to be displayed, before it gets automtically skipped by the system.|
-|Text |The hashmap is a list of <<language-id>,<text>> pairs. The hashmap is a list of <<language-id>,<text>> pairs. Use the GetCurrentText() method to request the currently translated text content, depending on the dialogue system language setting.|
-|Events |Returns a collection of item events.|
-==== Kinds of items ====
-A dialogue seldomly is just a text flow. You nearly always will have questions, answers to choose from or points to which to return to.
-Our dialogue system allows to configure those variations easily.
-^Kind ^Description^
-|TGorillaDialogueItemKind.None|undefined kind - should never be set|
-|TGorillaDialogueItemKind.Question|A text-fragment marked as question. This will load up sub-items as possible answers to choose from.|
-|TGorillaDialogueItemKind.Answer|Text-fragments marked as possible options to choose from. The parent item should be a question item.|
-|TGorillaDialogueItemKind.Flow|A default text-fragment, simply plays back for a defined timespan and then switches to the next item in row|
-|TGorillaDialogueItemKind.Reference|A reference item is used as dummy fragment to forward to another item. Use this to jump at specific text-fragments in your dialogue. For example if you want to reask a question.|
-===== Events =====
-Events in items allow interaction with your game and to control the text flow of the conversation.
-<file pascal>
-LItem : TGorillaDialogueItem;
-LEvent : TGorillaDialogueItemEvent;
-[...]
-LEvent := LItem.Events.Add() as TGorillaDialogueItemEvent;
-LEvent.Kind := TGorillaDialogueEventKind.Text;
-LEvent.Trigger := TGorillaDialogueEventTrigger.OnBegin;
-</file>
-A few configuration properties allowing you to setup an event for many purposes:
-^Property ^Description ^
-|OwnerEvent |It is possible to execute events by another event. For example for animations, where you have a starting and finish event. |
-|Kind|Defines the kind of event. Supported types are: Text, Image, Audio, Video, Animation, Method, ObjProperty, Redirect, Timer, Misc|
-|Trigger |Defines the moment of event execution. Supported types are: OnBegin, OnEnd, OnTimeout|
-|Scope | A scope should be a component name or a dialogue item ident. Which value to be used depends on the kind of event.|
-|Data |Defines the multilingual data container.Use this property to define languag specific texts, f.e. for displaying a text event.|
-|Iterations |If the property is set to zero, functionality is disabled. Values larger than zero, perform iteration checks inside Execute() method.|