Dialogue Editor

What it’s for

While in Developer Mode you can see an option for Dialogue Editor in the main menu. This lets you write text for use in the sex scenes. It saves out to a dialogue.json file.

Current Status

If you’re looking to do a translation, the dialogue editor isn’t a one stop shop for all the game’s text unfortunately. There’s still a lot of text in HTML templates and in Python code which would need to be moved into data files; the dialogue editor only helps for the sex scene content and the popups when you install transformations.

How it works

Dialogue is a rules engine. When an event is fired by the game logic in python-land (e.g. on_arouse), it searches through all the rules for that event, figures out which ones have matching criteria, and uses the most specific match as the source of text.

Each turn in the encounter there’s typically an event for the action the player picked, events for the partner reacting with fear or lust, and an event for what the partner did that turn.

Usage

  • Look for the Select Rule dropdown menu. This lets you pick the rule to view or edit.
  • Below, there’s the content of the rule. It’s divided into:
    • An ID, which can be set to anything (please don’t edit the IDs of the existing rules, in old profiles it’ll orphan their usage counts, cooldowns etc.)
    • The WHEN section. Which encounter event triggers the rule and whether it’s specific to a particular character. (if not, set character to ‘generic’)
    • The IF section. This is an optional list of criteria. The rule only runs if all the criteria are met.
    • The THEN section. This is a list of messages to show to the player. They can have string substitutions. One is selected each time the rule is triggered. The selection can be by random shuffle, the order they appear, or by checking a decision variable and finding out which interval it goes in, in a scale from low to high.
    • Miscellaneous fields for who’s editing it and suchlike.
  • There are lots of rules. If you’re having trouble locating one, you can use the filter fields at the very top of the page to limit what appears in the Select Rule dropdown. A rule needs to pass all the filters to be shown. If no rules pass the filters, all of the rules are shown.

Making changes

  1. Let’s say you’ve cloned an existing rule.
  2. Give it a unique rule ID.
  3. Make your edits.
  4. Hit the Save button to save it to memory.
  5. Once you’ve finished all your rules, hit the Export Changed button. You’ll see a file requester. Save the rules out as dialogue.json in your mod’s folder.
    Note: Export Changed will collect all of the rules from all of the loaded mods and write them into a file. If you have other mods loaded, it’ll scoop up their dialogue rules too.