Building a conversation with Pages

The Tutorial covers the basics of setting up a Pages dialogue tree. This page covers some more advanced techniques once you’ve got the hang of it.

When to use Pages

Quest Viva has several ways to let the player talk to a character - see Talking to characters for an overview. Pages are the right choice when you want a structured, multi-step exchange where each reply leads to a fixed set of further choices - the Text Adventure equivalent of a gamebook’s branching passages. For a one-off list of topics with no follow-up, a menu is simpler. For a free-form “ask about anything” system, use Ask/Tell instead.

Each choice is a complete, ordinary turn, so the player can save at any point in a conversation - see Menus, Pages and saving for how this compares with menus. (The player cannot type UNDO while the dialogue is waiting, because what they type is taken as their choice.)

The page object

A page is any object that inherits the dialoguepage type - normally created via “Add Page” in the tree, which sets this up for you along with the editor’s “Page” tab. Pages are invisible and not world-scoped, so they don’t clutter “look”, “take all” or disambiguation menus, and it doesn’t matter where in the tree you put them - directly under the character they belong to, or gathered together under a folder of their own.

Each page has:

a description - the text shown when the page is displayed
an options dictionary - the object name of each linked page, mapped to its link text
a page type - Text (just shows the description), Script (runs a script instead of showing any text or options), or Script + Text (runs a script, then shows the description and options as normal)

Starting and redirecting

ShowPage starts a dialogue at a given page. Call it from wherever you want the conversation to begin - a verb, a command, an Ask/Tell topic, or a timer:

ShowPage (bob_chat, true, false)

From inside a page’s own script (Script or Script + Text page types), you can redirect to a different page with GoToPage - useful for skipping a page based on game state, the same way you might branch a SPEAK TO response:

if (not chest.locked) {
  GoToPage (bob_chest_open)
}
else {
  GoToPage (bob_chest_locked)
}

If a Script or Script + Text page’s script doesn’t redirect anywhere else, the dialogue simply ends once it’s finished running (for a plain Script page, without ever showing that page’s own description).

Linking to a page from text

To start a conversation from a link in ordinary text - a room description, say, or an object’s “look at” description - use the {page:} text processor command. The Page button on the text editor’s toolbar inserts one, letting you pick the page and the link text:

Bob is leaning on the bar. You could {page:bob_chat:talk to him}.

Clicking “talk to him” starts the conversation at bob_chat. Once the link has been shown, typing the page’s name (bob_chat) does the same; before that, the page’s name isn’t a command the player can use.

A conversation started this way doesn’t let the player leave by typing another command - they’re asked to choose one of the options. So give it a way out, such as a “Goodbye” option leading to a page with no options. If you need different settings, use a command link to a command whose script calls ShowPage instead.

Ending early

A page with an empty options list ends the dialogue automatically once it’s shown. To end things early from partway through a page’s own script - for example, some game state means this exchange should be cut short - call EndPageDialogue directly; it hides the current page’s options and clears the dialogue state before the option list would otherwise have been printed.

Building options dynamically

The editor’s Options list is the easiest way to set up a page’s links, but you can also add and remove them from a script, which is useful for a conversation that changes shape as the game progresses - for example, unlocking a new topic once the player has found some evidence. AddPageLink and RemovePageLink do this:

AddPageLink (bob_chat, bob_lab_report, "Ask about the lab report")

Calling AddPageLink again for the same source and destination replaces the existing link’s text rather than adding a duplicate. To remove an option later:

RemovePageLink (bob_chat, bob_lab_report)

Under the hood, options are stored in the page’s options attribute, a stringdictionary keyed by the destination page’s object name - AddPageLink/RemovePageLink are just a convenient wrapper around dictionary add/dictionary remove on that attribute, so you can fall back to those directly for anything more unusual.

Options that only sometimes appear

To show an option only when something is true - “Ask about the lab report” once the player has found it, say - set the page’s type to “Script + Text” and add or remove the link in its script. The script runs every time the page is shown, before its options are listed, and this is the page:

if (Got(lab_report)) {
  AddPageLink (this, bob_lab_report, "Ask about the lab report")
}
else {
  RemovePageLink (this, bob_lab_report)
}

Added options appear after the ones set up in the editor. In the editor, these are “Add page link” and “Remove page link” in the Pages category.

Remembering what’s been said

HasSeenPage returns whether a given page has already been shown, based on its visited attribute, so you can vary a page’s script the second time the player reaches it - see the Tutorial for a worked example.