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[ChilledOut]

I'm looking for a tool to facilitate the creation of dialogue trees for an RPG. Ideally it would save the data in a common format, like XML. I'd prefer open source but I'll take whatever I can get! Does anything like this exist?

[DrDerekDoctors]

Sounds a little specialised, tbh. I expect there's something of that ilk built into RPG maker, but tbh why not do it yourself? It'd be a pretty simply language to knock up and then it'd have all the flexibility you require.

[george]

The only decent tool I'm aware of is the editor for Neverwinter Nights (in their Aurora editor). The only other talk I've heard about other tree editors is here, but unfortunately the tool referenced there is no longer available as far as I know. If you go to the NWNvault you can find a list of conversation related programs; go to http://nwvault.ign.com/, do a site search for 'conversation' then look down the results for the link labeled 'Other'. There looks like a couple of possibilities there but I'm not sure what will be helpful, sorry.

Since you mention it this kind of tool is something I've thought about having a go at, but I haven't done any work on it so far. What kind of features would you want?

 

[Farbs]

How much data are you going to create? You might find it's quicker just to hand edit some xml.

[ChilledOut]

The Neverwinter Nights Aurora editor is a perfect example of the features that would be useful. If you are going to take a crack at this, I would consider just making a simpler version of that. Important features that I think could differentiate it would be:

1. XML output
2. Open source (every game is going to have specific needs)
3. A way to test/preview the conversation out of game. NWN may have this, i forget.

I don't think this type of tool is *that* specialized, as it could be used for most RPGs, and even some other games. The difficult and game specific part would be incorporating flags and variables that are set or read by the game.