~ xriss 2017-03-19 Chatdown

Chatdown is a markdown like text format for describing chat trees, the idea is to have all the logic somewhere else and just use this for describing the relationship and hierarchy of the text.

The bad news is this means you have to label each part of the chat with reasonable ids so the code can find it. Naming things is hard and has to be done.

Mostly the file is interpreted as paragraphs similar to markdowns paragraphs separated by empty lines, between these paragraphs lines beginning with one of the special characters #<>= switch the mode, and assign where the next set of paragraphs will be stored.

Following immediately on from these special characters with no white space in between are the id labels, these are used to name each set of paragraphs and allow references between them. This is the most complex part of the chatdown format.

A chat is started by beginning a line with a # this can be thought of as the talky part of an NPCs brain and a chatdown file contains multiple chats. These chats can reference each other, for example one NPC can check what you have told another NPC.

The first paragraph of a #chat is the display name of the NPC, the rest of the paragraphs are a longer description. More data can also be associated with the NPC here but I will go into that another time.

Responses are started with a < and they belong to the current chat, these are the things that an NPC says, for instance, <welcome is the first thing an NPC says when you talk to them.

Decisions are your choices that can be made after an NPC talks, started with a > these are stored in the current response and are primarily links to another response.

With decisions the first paragraph is displayed and the remaining paragraphs can be used as the spoken out loud dialogue. Some styles of dialogue writing use this form, others only need the first paragraph.

Proxies are variables associated with this chat, they are assigned by lines beginning with an = and all paragraphs following are given to this proxy. Proxies way be set inside any of the other states and the change will happen as you progress through the chat. This allows us to track decisions by changing a proxy inside the decision.

Proxies may be expanded inside paragraphs or even option names by using squiggly brackets like so {proxyname}, more complicated expansions will be added later if needed.

This is just an overview and its best we explain with some code, so take a look at the following chatdown example which you will find embedded at the top of this fun64 file. The code to parse and display this format is included, probably best you do not look too closely at that bit :)

Since chatdown took some time to formalise, it is also going to take more than one short post to explain, expect a follow up with a more complex example.