Hope these are useful to people:
Using an external word-processor
I use a word-processor to write my dialogs before I copy-and-paste them into the Ring editor. I do this to:
- Keeps a seperate record of them all in one place (just in case the scenario file gets corrupted...yes, I am that paranoid).
- Allows me to write my prose in a decent editor (with, most importantly, a spell-checker) before I copy-and-paste them across to the Ring editor.
- I can read and update text off-line.
- I can have newlines in text (you can't do this if you write directly into the Ring editor).
Mutiple use dialog (no longer required)
Due to the limit on the number of entities in a scenario, I've discovered that it is not a lot more work to keep all the one-liner dialogs in a single Dialog Entity. This is rather than using a whole dialog to say something simple like "Hello! I'm a town guard. I guard the town!". I still think it is worth keeping more complex dialogs in their own dialog to avoid complicating things though. You need to enter the dialog at specific steps ("when my_NPC is targetted, start my_NPC_dialog at step N") and put events on each step of the Dialog ("when my_dialog step N is finished, stop my_dialog"). You'll also need to put at least a 3-second delay on EVERY dialog step, or it won't stop properly; any less and you'll get subequent steps firing before the stop event is actually triggered.
**EDIT** This is less of a problem in the patch that occured since I posted this (Was 100 entities, now 200 entities) - also there is now a "pause at end" option which means that you can pause a dialog after
any dialog step without using an event.