String Length in Dialogue

[Kahless25]

I've been having some problems with dialogue: namely, the dialogue I write for my NPCs is too long. The editor says they're too long to parse unless I split up my lines into text1, text2, etc. This has two main disadvantages, however. Firstly, it forces me to skip spaces where I really don't want to (going from text1 to text2 means going to the next line in the dialogue window). Secondly, it severely hampers my use of DEP_ON_SPF, since I often need more than text1 and text2 to fit in what I want to say if the flag isn't triggered.

 

So, is there some way around these, preferably by extending the max length of strings? Lacking this, is there any way to have long paragraphs in dialogue without skipped spaces?

 

Also, does anyone know the exact maximum length for strings in dialogue?

[spyderbytes]

Quote:

Originally written by Kahless25:
Also, does anyone know the exact maximum length for strings in dialogue?

255 characters (spaces, punctuation, etc. count).

Listen to real conversations... people don't go for long at a time without pausing and giving the other party a chance to jump in. More importantly, players grow bleary-eyed at long, unbroken blocks of text, often skipping them altogether.

Do your players a favor and edit those long blocks of text down to something more digestable.

[Kelandon]

I don't know if this goes without saying, but you can also use the calls clear_strings and add_string and remove_string to deal with dialogue that depends on SDFs.

 

But yeah, take spyderbytes's advice and keep it to relatively short segments. Try not to have more than two or three text strings in consecutive dialog nodes, as a rule of thumb.

[Kahless25]

You're right; I suppose my style is a bit verbose. I'm actually just fond of long descriptions of people and their behavior, but you have a point that those can get tedious after a while.

 

On another note, when I'm writing in notepad, I like to hit enter every time I hit the right end of the screen, so I can read all my dialogue without having to scroll to the right. But this causes strange symbols to appear in dialogue in these places. Are there any text editors that don't force you to have each text string on a single line?

[Crunchy Frog]

Notepad has a word wrap function. Just remember to turn it off when you want to count line numbers.