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A question about dialogue boxes!

I'm new to both coding and Pico so bear with me, maybe there's no right answer but would appreciate suggestions.

Say you have a standard type of RPG game with a character who moves, and you approach or talk to an NPC, triggering a dialogue box on top of what's already on the screen (just like any old pokemon or dragon quest game). What would be an efficient way to do this? Load a new scene but don't clear the screen? Disable the player character's movement and actions while a list of text cycles through?

I've made a clunky textbox function (see image) but there must be a better way.

Any ideas or links to successful examples would be great.

Thanks in advance to anyone who answers!

1
2

Here's one way you can consider to approach this.

Suppose your normal gameplay loop code looks like:

 
function game_update()
 -- usual gameplay update code...
end

function game_draw()
 -- usual draw code...
end

-- gets called from title screen
function start_game()
 -- do some init...

 _update=game_update
 _draw=game_draw
end

You'd have some means of detecting of when you encounter an npc

 
function game_update()
 -- usual gameplay update code
 -- ...

 -- dpad left, for example
 if btnp(0) then
  -- some kind of npc detection code
  local npc=get_npc_at(player.x-1,player.y)
  if npc then -- not nil means there was an npc
   talk_to(npc)
  else
   -- normal move logic
   -- check for walls etc
   player.x-=1
  end
 end

 -- etc...
end

That would cause a temporary switch out from the normal gameplay loop functions for dialogue handling

 
function talk_to(npc)
 dialogue = npc.dialogue -- a list of "things to say"
 d_step = 1
 _update=dialogue_update
 _draw=nil -- no need to constantly draw at 30/60 fps
 dialogue_draw()
end

Those functions would be something like

 
function dialogue_update()
 if btnp(4) then
  d_step+=1 -- next chunk of speech

  if d_step>#dialogue then -- end of conversation
   -- back to the usual gameplay
   _update=game_update
   _draw=game_draw
   return
  end

  dialogue_draw()
 end
end

function dialogue_draw()
 game_draw() -- underlying game graphics as backdrop
 local ds=dialogue[d_step] -- data 

 -- draw character "talking head" picture from packed spr args
 -- having this per step lets you move things around the screen
 -- or have a conversation involving multiple npcs
 spr(unpack(ds.spr))

 -- dialogue textbox
 rectfill(ds.x0,ds.y0,ds.x1,ds.y1,ds.bgcolor)
 rect(ds.x0,ds.y0,ds.x1,ds.y1,ds.bordercolor)
 print(ds.text,ds.tx,ds.ty,ds.tcolor)
end


Thankyou Cakepie! Multiple npc conversation is what I was hoping to work out so that's great. This is all so much simpler than my code so far. Time for some revisions
1

Glad to hear that was useful!

Do note that I've just edited the code to add an early return in dialogue_update to prevent an out of bounds error.
1

Another user posted a dialog library cartridge last year, this might be useful for you or give you some ideas for your own. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=82185#p



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