Dialog Progress

I am labouring away at a text based dialog blueprint.

So far each string of dialog has to be set to display one by one, with 24 letters per line. I see spreadsheets on the horizon.

I'm working on a History display for the dialog too, to display past conversations up to the present, like Skype or Facebook chat.

When walking up to an NPC, the cursor appears to allow them to be clicked on, which starts a conversation.

I have figured out how to animate HUD elements so they move into the view to a desired location at a desired speed.

I figured out how to add Kerning to a font (increases the gap between letters so cases like 'll" look readable).

I have figured out how to make a button rollout that remembers the elements that get slid off screen when they are rolled back on to the screen again; and along with that correctly display a real-time image of the character ... and their name as a tooltip when the cursor rolls over the image. I figured out how to make an array of materials and call them by their name. And I learned a lot about placing fonts (right justification and line spacing and handling any number of lines), and populating the text with the correct strings per character per conversation.

And I updated the project to UE4.1 and it only took a few minutes.

Still to do:

• Make the History display all the history not just the most recent lines and make it scrollable and save it.

• Add player conversation choices for each NPC (branching dialog etc)

• Use typing input (I figured out recently) as an option to answer certain questions

• Make clickable hitboxes per line of text in the display to shift the dialog so that hit line's string moves to the top (RMB) or bottom (LMB) - pretty much just maths.