FMF Dialogue Tool quick start tutorial

I recommend you read Pjnt of www.fanmadefallout.com's guide to Dialogue\_Training.

You can download the Tool here.

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This is the first window you see when you fire up the tool, and is used to play through dialogues to check for errors and consistency, or just to hear what the NPC has to say. You can start the dialogue with the 'Run dialogue' button. This will play the node selected in the 'start node' field.

Double-click a player option to travel to the appropriate node. Highlighting an option with a single click allows you to see any designer notes for that option in the lowermost field. The 'Go back' and 'Go forward' buttons allow you to retrace your path and explore all the options and responses.

The 'Edit dialogue' button brings up the dialogue editor, which is where most writers will spend their time. The 'Edit this node' button allows you to quickly edit the currently viewed node: this is put to best use fixing spelling errors and bad links and similar small alterations.

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This is where all the real work is done. The buttons on the right-hand side are mostly self-explanatory: 'Add' creates a new node and brings up the Add Node window, where you can put in the NPC text and player options. Edit and delete affect selected nodes as you might imagine.

Selecting a node and pressing 'Clone' will create a new node identical to the selected. This is a quick way to make multiple nodes with the same player options but different NPC text.

'Rearrange' attempts to organize the list of nodes alphabetically or in numerical order. 'Move Up' and 'Move Down' allow you to manually reorder the node list.

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When you add or edit a node in the Dialogue Editor, or quick-edit a node from the playback window, you'll be looking at the 'Add Node' box.

Fill in the node name, NPC text and any notes for that node. If you want the text to appear differently to female PCs, check the box and enter the alternate text.

The buttons on the bottom of the window deal with the player options. Adding an option, or editing an existing option, brings up the 'Add Player Option' window.

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Type the option text and designer notes in the appropriate fields. If the option ends the dialogue or initiates combat, check the appropriate box and you're done.

If the option links to an unwritten node, you can create that node here by typing an unused node name into the 'Name for new node' field and pressing 'Create node'. You can add the NPC text for that node here, but the player options must be added later.

If the option links to a node that already exists, uncheck the 'Links to new node' box to access a drop-down menu of existing nodes. The text of the node to be linked to is displayed beneath the drop-down menu.

Condition checks can be set up in two ways: the most common checks, intelligence and gender, can be set via drop-down menus from this window. To add more complex conditions to the node, press 'Additional conditions' on the lower left. (The text on the button may have

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```
The left part of this window lists the current conditions necessary for this option to appear to the player.

```

To add a new condition, select the condition type (stat, skill, money) from the upper drop-down list and highlight the appropriate stat or skill in the right-hand field. Next, select the type of evaluation (less than, more than etc) from the lower drop-down and enter the value that you want to test against. Then press 'Add' to add this condition to the left-hand list.

For instance, if the dialogue option requires the PC have a perception of eight or more, select 'Stat' from the upper list, highlight Perception and select the evaluation type '>= (larger than or equal to)'. Type the number 8 into the value field and press 'Add'.