[WIP] NPC Dialogue, Phase 1: Survivor Stories

[I-am-Erk]

This is my first PR, be gentle.

Update: fixed some basic stuff
Reviewers feel free to disregard the "talk_professions" file for now. It just adds more stories. In terms of how things are actually done, talk_common includes examples of everything I'm trying to do.

Update2: OK. This should be about ready for prime time.
There is still stuff to go, some of the conversations are bare-bones, but overall it's at a point where - content wise - it could be added to master safely. I'm sure I have messed something up that will get in the way...

Summary

SUMMARY: Content "NPC Dialogue - survivor stories"

Purpose of change

This will introduce 'background survivor stories' (BGSS) for NPCs.

I see this as the first phase in a wider project to give party member NPCs more personality and uniqueness, and as a side effect, to give NPCs dialogue that will flesh out the background to the cataclysm as it is seen to survivors (rather than the current rather high concept science/political stuff we mostly get).

Describe the solution

Each NPC is assigned a story trait at creation, grouped loosely based on the presumed origins of the current NPC classes.

Once in the party, NPCs gain an additional dialogue option "Let's just talk." - under header TALK_LEADER. This will open the option to ask them about how they survived the cataclysm.

Additional context

I'm submitting this as a work in progress. Not all survivor stories are complete and I am still editing them in, particularly in NPC_talk.json. This is my first JSON adventure so I am sure the coding could use some cleanup, but I have been able to get it running correctly in my home copy.

At a later date (possibly by the end of this PR) I will add more NPC classes as well to allow a wider range of survivor types and stories.

Some features that I would like to see as part of this project (not necessarily this PR):

• being able to test how long it has been since the cataclysm in JSON, so that I can have NPCs spawned after the first year get special background stories that describe a longer interval since the apocalypse
• being able to code dialogue gender tags, so that if the NPC is female she can talk about her husband and if he's male he can talk about his wife

[mlangsdorf]

It's a great start, and kudos to you for doing this.

A couple of overall comments:

• you'll need to run all of this through the JSON linter before final submission. You should probably start getting used to writing in CDDA's JSON style.
• CDDA manual style requires two spaces after '.' in displayed text.

This probably too large a PR for sensible review. I burnt out around BGSS_HOSPITAL_1_STORY1. I recommend splitting it up some more - just do a single variant of each story for now, let people review it, and then come back and write some more.

But all of that is relatively minor. Overall, this is great stuff and keep working at it.

[mlangsdorf]

It's a great start, and kudos to you for doing this.

A couple of overall comments:

• you'll need to run all of this through the JSON linter before final submission. You should probably start getting used to writing in CDDA's JSON style.
• CDDA manual style requires two spaces after '.' in displayed text.

This probably too large a PR for sensible review. I burnt out around BGSS_HOSPITAL_1_STORY1. I recommend splitting it up some more - just do a single variant of each story for now, let people review it, and then come back and write some more.

But all of that is relatively minor. Overall, this is great stuff and keep working at it.

[mlangsdorf]

Also, about your feature requests:

• dynamic lines can be filtered against "npc_male" and "npc_female". I can add that as a response condition very easily.
• filtering dynamic lines against time since cataclysm will also be pretty easy to add.

[mlangsdorf]

Looking good, just some more minor nits.

[mlangsdorf]

Looking good, just some more minor nits.

[mlangsdorf]

Response lines for all the other STORY1 topics needed.

It might be worthwhile for me to build some smarts into npctalk.cpp, so that these copy-paste response lines are autogenerated. Something like you add a tag to the story1 topics with the required trait, and then TALK_LEADER reads through all off them and adds the appropriate one.

[I-am-Erk]

I'd appreciate that...
If I set it up like this:

`"id": "BGSS_CONFUSED_1_STORY1",

"type": "talk_topic",

"parent_topic": "TALK_LEADER",

"trigger_on_trait": "BGSS_confused_1",

"dynamic_line":`

would that provide the infrastructure you'd need to set it up?

[I-am-Erk]

All the stories I have planned for this PR are entered at least enough to be publishable in an initial state. I will go about the legwork of adding in all the traits and the initial conversation calls next. After that, some of the details like NPC reactions (negative reaction for religious insult or for failing a persuasion check, adding a timer for failed persuasion checks, etc), NPC offers to sell items, and a few other little things.

Things I will probably leave to future PRs:
-Differentiating partner gender in talks about spouses/significant others.... I am still debating if I want to roll sexual preferences into that as well since I have a solid idea how I would like to do that now, and it's pretty straightforward (no pun intended)
-Adding in more classes, because I have enough stuff to do without making more work for myself just yet
-Adding in stories only available after x amount of time has passed, same as above
-More story variety. I actually have a significant stockpile of partly written stories still, but this is too bulky already.

Things I'd love to see done before finishing this PR, but are still outside my skillset:
-some autogenerated responses from npctalk to reduce the giant table of contents at the start
-the ability to make traits hidden from the '@' screen so that players don't see the NPC's backstory of choice

[Leland]

Want to do a once over of the prose before this gets merged

[I-am-Erk]

I'm not certain, but I think this is about ready for review. There are two things I just remembered it needs, before merging:

1. I have to go in and add a double space after every period, which is easy enough.
2. I need to run it through a de-linter. I've heard of this but I don't know what it is or how to do it. Can anyone help there?

Aside from this, are there any outstanding things before it can be merged?

[I-am-Erk]

Travis is giving me the following error:
Makefile:1071: recipe for target 'data/json/npcs/BG_trait_groups.json' failed
make: *** [data/json/npcs/BG_trait_groups.json] Error 1
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs...

Does anyone know what this means?

[cainiaowu]

It says this
Formatted data/json/npcs/BG_trait_groups.json

Which means you need to put this file though the web linter.

[I-am-Erk]

All checks passed! I will test this out one more time in my home copy this evening, and if anyone else wants to give it a whirl, I'm hoping it's ready to commit so that I can start making more background stories and my next step - personal histories (where did you work, who was your family).

[Leland]

There are >7,000 words of dialogue in this PR, for the ease of review I'd recommend splitting it up.

[I-am-Erk]

I feel like you don't appreciate my nanowrimo efforts.

Do you want it split up simply for prose review, or for code? I can give the prose in a much more legible format pretty easily

[mlangsdorf]

Consider splitting it up because its 3K lines of changes, and 1-1.5K lines of changes is around the limit for sensible review.

[I-am-Erk]

Ok. I'll see what a logical way to split it up would be.

[I-am-Erk]

This PR can likely now be safely closed, as I have split it into four different ones that each do a single thing.

[Leland]

Thanks for the split @I-am-Erk