Avoiding players restarting each others' dialogs
Something that is not very obvious while developing/soloing a Ring scenario is that players can restart a dialog that another player is reading. I'm refering specifically to dialogs broken up with {break}, started by targetting an NPC, rather than "looping chatter" type dialogs. e.g.
- Gwillim clicks on the Verbose NPC and reads the first couple of pages of text. There are more pages to go after this, but the prose is so well written that he is looking forward to it (
) - Gwyneth comes along and targets Verbose NPC and starts reading...What she isn't aware of is that by starting her own copy of the dialog up, she has reset Gwillim's dialog back to the first page of text.
- Gwillim has to click through ("skip") to where he was up to before now. In all likelyhood, Sal will arrive before he gets there and restart the dialog for him again. Gwillim cries.
OK, so how do you stop this from happening? You must add a
condition that the dialog is not to be started unless it is not already running (i.e. create a condition of "dialog not running" on the event that starts the dialog). That way, if someone else causes the dialog to start, then I (Who am already in the middle of the dialog) will not have the dialog restart. This also prevents people accidentally re-targetting the NPC (For example, if someone double-clicks on an NPC who triggers a dialog, then the Dialog with appear, then a second later, it will disappear and appear again).