Overview

Table of Contents

The Dialogue System consists of these main parts:

  • Dialogue Database: Contains your conversations, quests, and variables.
  • Dialogue Editor: Edits dialogue databases. You can also import and export third party formats.
  • Dialogue Manager: Manages Dialogue System activity at runtime. A prefab is provided.
  • Dialogue UIs: Displays interactive conversations, alert messages, quest journals, etc.
  • Interaction System: Triggers activity at runtime such as starting conversations.

Dialogue Database

A dialogue database is an asset file that contains your conversations, quests, and user-defined variables. You will typically use the Dialogue Editor to edit its content, although you can also import from several others formats.

The dialogue database contains design-time content, fields that you edit in the Unity editor. At runtime, the Dialogue System treats the dialogue database as read-only; it loads the dialogue database fields into Lua where the values can be changed during play.

Dialogue Editor

Use the Dialogue Editor to edit your dialogue database and view its runtime state in play mode. For detailed information about the Dialogue Editor, see Dialogue Editor. To import other formats such as articy:draft and Chat Mapper, see Import & Export.

Dialogue Manager

The Dialogue Manager is a GameObject in your scene that coordinates all Dialogue System activity and holds the Dialogue System’s runtime data. The Dialogue Manager section covers it in detail.

Dialogue UIs

The Dialogue System uses the following UIs:

  • Dialogue UI: Runs interactive conversations & alert messages. (Example shown above.)
  • Quest Log Window: Shows the player’s active and completed quests.
  • Quest Tracker HUD: Shows tracking information for active quests.

For detailed information about dialogue UIs, see Dialogue UIs. For information about quest UIs, see Quests.

Interaction System

The Dialogue System provides components to interact with GameObjects and perform actions such as starting conversations and updating quest states.

Localization

The Dialogue System supports localization of dialogue database content and general UI elements. For information about localization, see Localization.

Extending the Dialogue System

While the Dialogue System’s default capabilities are quite powerful and flexible, you can also create your own logic functions, cutscene actions, UI types, and more. This is covered in Scripting.

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