I've spent a few days working with flow charts to implement a simple dialogue system in my next project. After working on Bilkins' Folly and dealing with all the complex dialogue trees in that game (composed in Dialogue Designer), I really wish flow charts were a thing a few years ago!

I have a few recommendations, at least some of them I suspect are already planned.

• Select multiple nodes at once using drap and drop. Right now, it seems like only one node can be moved at a time, which is a problem when trying to organize large charts.

• Drag from a node to create a new node. Much like how Unreal's BP allows you to quickly create a new node if you drag from a pin to an empty space.

• Duplicate nodes - dragging a node while holding alt should create a copy of that node.

• More workspace – preferably infinite. Creating nodes left-to-right, it didn't take long to reach the end of the workspace. It doesn't help that the default node starts in the middle of the workspace instead of over to the left.

• More zoom out. Right now it seems you can infinitely zoom in, but zoom out gets stopped before revealing the full canvas.

• A mini-map. Once devs start making huge flowcharts, it's useful to have a minimap available that can be used to quickly pan through the workspace.

• Commenting an area. Preferably in the style of BP that allows colour coding and grouping of nodes.

Other node types and tweaks. This is probably a bit more specific to treating flow charts as a dialogue builder, however I feel these suggestions would make flowcharts even more powerful:

• Character fields - Specifically for a dialogue system, you often need to know what character is speaking and what animation (or frame if it's a static image) to display. A character field (or some other way of accessing additional data on a per-node basis) would be handy for this. Right now, it's possible to do this by utilizing the default field, but that's kind of annoying as you're always making new fields on node creation.

• The 'execute code' node - Right now, I'm using the tag field to execute specific pieces of code using tokens. It's a bit clunky as an entire node needs to be created in order to access this. An 'execute code' would essentially just be a tag and nothing else. It would help reduce bloat and is actually a super powerful way of handling logic inside of a dialogue loop. For Bilkins, I had over 30 different codes that I could call from a simple tag-like node and signal the game to do something.

• Conditional branches - a binary node that outputs either true or false based on a condition. Could either take in a global Boolean (or flowcharts could be given their own variables) or it could remain up to the developer to determine how to feed conditions into it. This can be expanded with logic operators to make it more powerful.

• Random branches – this node has multiple outputs and randomly picks one to go next. Useful for dialogue in situations like greetings where you might want an npc to mix up their message each time the player interacts with them.

Ta!

For Conditional and Random branches. I reckon being able to decouple outputs from options/values by manipulating the routing of outputs with conditions in events

would bring that and much more requested in this thread.

I am myself also looking into using it as dialogue editor for a Point n Click adventure game and the flowchart would actually look really close to the UI for in-game dialogue options (very user friendly), if I did not have to create a lot more nodes just to specify routing and conditions, which works against the visual appeal of using Flowcharts in my opinion.

Please correct me if wrong, but this is already one of the smallest teams that supports the development of a commercial game engine that I know of, and not a cheap one to afford for the matter.

While it had its benefits years back, there are already sentiments and concerns about resources and business models not scaling up fast enough, thus affecting the product roadmap shifting from a performant commercial 2D game engine to an education centric tool, to adding limited 3d features and more, while some are still hoping for the 2D engine to become more robust to support years long projects in the making, often ported from previous versions of the product.

From a product market delivery perspective, the product roadmap is not really clear to early adopters who were hoping the subscription model would push C2 to the next performance level, so it can scale better for larger games and releases that were in the making for the previous years, but ended up shifting its go-to-marketing focus to different verticals. This is where another product should have seen the light instead of making it part of the early offering and blur the initial messaging.

Now Scirra is launching a second product. Even if smaller in terms of scope than the game engine and without disclosing private business strategies, is it fair to ask Scirra about its plan to reassure its customers and qualm the fears of a slowdown in the development of the game engine, which had always been its sole focus in the past?

Please understand that I am not coming from an angry place, I sank thousands of hours of my life into Scirra's offering and regret very little about my time with it. My bad for still sticking around while I also could just walk away. If anything, these concerns come from a place of love for a product that I just hope can become better to a point devs would consider it for larger releases, knowing there is support, tried and tested features that support the end development stages of game development and a executive commitment behind it, to decide to foresee using Construct as a solution.

On a side note, there is no lack of initiatives that could help it, such as professional services, developer support or focusing development on features that meet these goals, but instead it seems as if there also was a lot of time spent into developing features that attract newcomers, but deviated from the original promises of the engine as a product in my opinion. Again, that is just my opinion and this is a free market and up to me to learn to use other tools, but in that case, a little more transparency on the roadmap of the company now that the company is more than one product would help.

Much love

It is a pretty big issue as projects grow bigger and I am sure there is no need to remind you that people are still working on their years long projects started with C2. Which explains why symptoms like this are being reported now .

holy crap, amazing!

Problem Description

As of today, IOS 10 should support the TTS API used by C2 ( http://caniuse.com/#search=tts ) , I get positive feedback when checking for TTS but not for user media and speech doesn't trigger, maybe for a related reason to the return value of the "is usermedia supported (see below)".

Attach a Capx

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6wF_vS_KZJ8amZremNncDVUQ3c?usp=sharing

I also have a version hosted here for testing directly :http://usermedia.surge.sh

Description of Capx

The capx starts two requests, one to see if the user media is supported, changing then the text on the left. The other requests checks to see if the speech synth is supported and changes the text on the right. On start of layout a sentence is triggered form TTS, as well as when you tap the screen (touch plugin). If the TTS works, you should hear a sentence. I made this to test TTS in many browsers.

Steps to Reproduce Bug

• download capx OR Use link above
• export project so you can play it online on ipad OR play over local network in preview mode OR use link above
• open safari or chrome on IOS and point to the URL ( local network or host URL)
• tap the screen to start the sentence
• See if user media and speech synthesis are supported

Observed Result

on IOS (tested on safari, chrome , via hosted site and local wifi network, the usermedia says that it is not supported, but the speech synth is. However no speech comes out . Both are supported on windows and OSX and the text works. As of today, speech synth should be supported on IOS 10 but doesn't seem to work really?

Expected Result

If the request to see that the speech synth give a true, I am expecting it to work, why can there be a configuration where the user media is not supported if the speech synth is in the first place?

here is a snapshot of what you should see if that works:

http://imgur.com/a/HLW3o

Affected Browsers

• Chrome IOS: (YES)
• Safari IOS: (YES)
• Chrome (mac/PC): (NO)
• Safari (PC): (NO)
• FireFox(PC): (NO) Operating System and Service Pack ____ Windows 10 pro ____ Construct 2 Version ID ____r242 ____

Hi Rex, love the plugins as always, thanks for all your time and efforts for this community! I was wondering if the plugin as it is, can get audio data from the user media's speech synth on "is speaking " events like for the microphone input? (https://tonejs.github.io/docs/#UserMedia ) . Much appreciated!

Yeah, great Idea Armaldio, it would be great it people could partake in helping with each plugin's manual and/or description. I love the tool Rex produced for his plugins, but one thing it lacks for sure are paragraphs of descriptions for his actions/conditions etc. In that case localization would be great for other languages. Good job, Keep up!

I strongly suggest that you get it from the Scirra website, my steam version has been nothing but troubles and as mentioned above, you do get teh liberty to deal with multiple instances of C2. I am even thinking of getting the personal licence again from scirra as working daily in C2, the Steam version has become the source of many troubles (app crashes, won't reload unless all instances of NW.js are ended, etc)

Hi there lucid , thank you for the hard work and support provided for the C2 community! I was wondering if the procedure for importing AND updating scml objects in C2 had changed since the performance update? I read what you said recently about being able to just reimport the files if not too many changes occurred within spriter in the meantime (new images, sounds etc) but do we still have to rename the scml file association to scon and then rename to scml in C2 before each update? I may have missed the info somewhere but are there other new things to know like that or is it strictly the same as before the performance update? All my searches point me to the official tut made years ago.

Also I use a lot of container sprites as you recommend in one of your videos in order to apply behaviors and I wished there was a way to not to suppress the container object when it gets updated by drag n dropping the scml file into the c2 project. Right now I have to unbind all my containers manually before any file update, which gets time consuming, maybe a feature to think of later on or again, something I missed? This was actually the reason why I was looking at alternate ways to update the files without breaking the containers every time.

Thank you again for your hard work and support, spriter is an amazing tool!

well, I know this is old, but I spent the last two days trying to accomplish this. Here is my experience so far:

The idea is simple, at some point, past a certain Y coordinate over the layout, the initial track fades out, then the second one fades in, being louder as you go further down the layout.

I tried the following things:

• a combination of play/stop and pause resume, if "Tag" playing/not playing, as well as play/stop only sequentially. With the official Audio plugin only.
• same thing using the similar from the RexRainbow plugin (Audio Helper), which is dependent from the official Audio plugin.
• Same thing, this time using a mix of Rex's plugin and of the official one.
• All the above, but with preloading the sound/music and making sure preloads were complete.

All worked. Then it stopped working on a relaunch , without me changing anything in the code. The second is triggered and plays, from what I noticed, when I just changed the code. If I restart it, it stops working consistently, I even end up with the song starting a few minutes after it should have. Again, I do not change anything in the code after it works, restart the project and stops.

I should probably mention that I use NW.js and tried it on chrome, same results on both. I also that I got my first NW.js error while quitting the game, and this after I started tying to play two music tracks at once.

I am very curious about what could be the reason behind the inconsistency of having two tracks playing at once. If you have any experience with mixing tracks together in Construct 2, your help would be very appreciated , thanks!

I know it is an old post, but was wondering if anyone dared purchasing it and tried to see how easy it is to use the xml output? I tried playing with their sample file, but it comes with so many attributes that it is all over the place and so far it seems worth trying to create the dialog file from scratch and reading through it by calling nodes with xpath expressions in C2 would be easier.

I do see that Chat Mapper has the option to remove many of the elements and attributes that come by default but still it seems that you will need some extra work on how to implement the output in C2.

Chat mapper seems like the perfect tool, but it seems more like a half step to create "non linear" dialogues, yet the second step has only been done for unity as they benefit from a plugin that integrates chat mapper pretty well.

There is an exporter developer kit that comes with the commercial version, but it ain't affordable for most indie gamedevs and I am sure little amount of people would like to buy it to see if that is possible or not.

At the moment, I am trying to work on an xml file that looks like simpler version of the chat mapper example, and build a routine in C2 using xpath that would work on a basic monologue/choices(4 max) dialogue system that I could reuse for any adventure game in the future. Yet I feel like there should be a better way to use the scripted conditions within chat mapper than what I am doing. Another thought. You can simulate the dialogue using lua script in ChatMapper, maybe you can reproduce it in C2 using the Lua_VM plugin from the fabulous RexRainbow?

As you can see, I came with more questions than answers

But I hope to hear some feedback from C2 users that may have used Chat Mapper as it seems a great tool , at least for composing the trees very quickly, compared to using "regular" xml editors.

I know of the alternatives that Rex offers in the scenario plugin but I would like to use ChatMapper to compose quickly and easily share the file with voice over actors who would choke looking at an xml tree file.

Cheers

Hey fisholith,

Thank you for your prompt reply. It was me then... solution was in the manual! Thank you for pointing it out, I can stop trying now, it was exactly the issue you described as I had sprites in this family.

Thanks again