Complex dialogues

[Domius]

I looked at a quest/dialogue tutorial on Creation Kit wiki and started making a dialogue for my mod. It's a little bit more complex though -- an example dialogue in the tutorial is really simple -- and I'm having some troubles. I could go on with things that are problematic there for a long time but I'll try to keep it short.

 

I want to have a list of topics and add some topics to it only when they're mentioned in some other bit of dialogue (i.e. info). I can't really make it work though. I can set a branch as top-level which will make it available from the beggining, or as normal which will treat it basically as a response -- exactly like topics inside a branch -- so it will give me no other choice than this topic. And I want it in the general topic list but not by default

 

I'm not sure if I'm clear so i'll give an example (based on the actual dialogue I'm working on).

 

I have topics A, B and C shown to the PC.

When the player clicks on topic A, he gets some response and goes back to the topic list with the same options A, B and C.

 

If the player clicks on B, he gets some info, then has to choose one of 2 responses (topics), gets another info and goes back to the general list. But now there's also an option D, because there was something mentioned in that conversation.

 

Or he can click C instead which will give him a simple info but also unlocks topic D.

 

I think it would be very simple to do if we could use variables. So I could make a script that says "set optionD to 1" and use it with infos in B and C branches. Then I could require a condition "optionD is 1" in order to show topic D. But as far as I know we can't use variables in dialogues (can we?). So the closest thing are quest stages but I don't think it's a good idea to overuse them. Also they are still limiting.

 

And I could add a LOT of links but that also doesn't seem like a good way to do this.

 

So... Any suggestions?

 

 

PS. There are possible conversations that are even more complex. For instance there could be an option E which would become available once the PC used topics C and D. So it can't be just set that it shows up after option D. The player could say B, then D, and in this case he still needs to click on C.

 

You know what I mean? How do I do stuff like this?

Edited February 13, 2012 by Domius