How heavy is the conversation system?

domx

Hi again Chris,

we are making up our minds whether to use the built in conversation system for AC. The benefits are obvious - good integration, use of actions and the translation subsystem. With the new editor this is more appealing than ever.

However... I am wondering how heavy the system can get with its game object based representation? We will have dialogues with up to 50 nodes (where as a node we understand a bit of text delivered by one of the sides taking part in the dialogue) and a single scene may contain quite a few dialogues (in one scene we will probably have around 15). Have you had a chance to profile it in anyway with different numbers of conversation and dialogue option objects to determine how much it may affect the performance? 

Thanks! 

wrongtarget

I was wondering the same. I have contacted the developer of Dialogue System for Unity in the hope he can get some kind of integration with AC, but it seems implausible considering how connected AC's dialogue is with the rest of it's features. 

ChrisIceBox

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "node", exactly.  Is this the equivalent of a Dialogue Option?

Dialogue Options are pretty lightweight, and while I haven't stress-tested it to the extent you ask, you should get better peformance the more you place in one Conversation object.  The new Conversation Editor makes viewing the various options easier to manage.

PixelCrushers

I think by "node" domx means a single "Dialogue: Play speech" item.

I'm working on Dialogue System for Unity integration. Basic integration will use the Dialogue System to run conversations, which scales up pretty well. A Hungarian team is using it for a project with over 500,000 words of dialogue and multiple languages in hundreds of conversations. It will synchronize AC's inventory and global variables with the Dialogue System's internal Lua environment, and it'll tie into AC's save/load system. And it will, of course, let you import conversations from articy:draft, Chat Mapper, or Aurora.

I'm also looking into the feasibility of converting Dialogue System data into AC interactions/dialogue options so you could use AC's built-in conversation system in the future.