Extending the JSON Dialogue System

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Published on 28 Jan, 2020. Last updated 31 Jan, 2020

Calling functions during Dialogue

It’s one thing just making some words appear on the screen, but wouldn’t it be nice if your dialogue did a little more than just show text? Well, with a little bit of function mapping, you can call functions from strings stored in your JSON file! This example is just going to use a simple function to move an object while an NPC is speaking, but the principle could be applied to all sorts of things.

The NPC spawns this emote after about three lines of dialogue, it clearly likes the player!

The first thing to do is to create the function we’re going to call. All we’re going to do with this demo is move our Heart object to above the NPC associated with this line of dialogue (the middle one), so the function is called HeartDemo:

On function HeartDemo

Heart ▶︎ Set position to (288, 32)

System ▶︎ Wait 2 seconds

Heart ▶︎ Destroy

Now that we’ve created the function, we need to map it to a specific string. This will be added as an action to the On Start of Layout event at the top of the event sheet:

Condition

System ▶︎ On Start of Layout

Action

Functions ▶︎ Map “JSONFunctions” string “MoveHeart” to HeartDemo

In this action, JSONFunctions is the name of the function map we’ll be using (you can have multiple function maps in a project) and the string MoveHeart is the string that is stored in the JSON to identify the function. We’re now assigning that string to the HeartDemo function.

Now that we’ve mapped our demo function, we need to add in the functionality to be able to call that function during the dialogue. The first thing needed to do this is another new function.

The DisplayFunction function is far simpler than the one we use to show dialogue, in fact it could be whittled down to just a single action if you prefer:

On function DisplayFunction

Number Parameter: dialogueID

Number Parameter: sceneID

Action

System ▶︎ Set layer “Dialogue” invisible

Functions ▶︎ Call function from “JSONFunctions” map with string JSON.Get(“scene.” & curScene & “.dialogs.” & curDialogue & “.function”)

When you add in the action to call the function, the dialog will have a box for Forward parameters, but you don’t need to worry about that in this case, leave it as zero.

So that’s the function that will call whichever function it finds in the JSON file, but we need to call the DisplayFunction function! To do this, a sub-event will be added to the event block where we call DisplayLine, that’s event 11 in the example project.

There’s already a sub-event for calling the DisplayLine function so the easiest thing to do is create a copy of that sub-event. Then, where the event says JSON key = “line”, change the word line to function. Then change the action to call DisplayFunction instead of DisplayLine. You should end up with this:

Now you have the events, you can create new functions, add them to the function map and add their strings to your JSON dialogue file. Just remember to make sure their type is defined as "function" in the JSON file!

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  • Hello, I'm Giuseppe from Italy.

    I tried to use this method to my buttons in Construct 3, but it dosen't work, why?

    Here I put my example code:

    nCasuale: random number

    Questiti.At(nCasuale,1): bidimensional array of sentencies (X,Y), where I inserted the /br code

    Line: string variable

    + System: on functio CreaQuesito

    -> Sistema: set text to Quesiti.At(nCasuale,1)

    -> Tasto01: set text to replace(line,"/br",newline)

    -> Tasto01: [Set CSS style "font-size" to "18px"]

    I hope you can help me

    Giuseppe