U6 Main

About dialogs (...what stopped me)

 

Trying to interpret the 'control bytes' :

After extracting the dialogs from the original files, I had to interpret them correctly. The beginning of each dialog is easy to understand : when you talk to a NPC => "You see <a description of the NPC, or his name if you already know him>". Then the NPC answers an initial <Hello> sentence the first time, and eventually a <Nice to see you again> sentence the other times. Then come several <Avatar question>/<NPC answer> couples. The <Bye> keyword ends the conversation. But a NPC's answer can contain a question ! This question can request either a simple Y/N answer, or a particular <keyword> branching to such or such dialog, sometimes back to a previous answer, and so on ... For instance, managing the sell/buy parts was a hard job, because you can argue the price, and the seller can refuse, etc...

Although all the sentences clearly appear in the extracted files, trying to link all these with minimum coding has been a nightmare for me. I finally didn't manage to code an engine using the "control bytes", which would work for the 200 NPCs.

An alternative would have been to code each of the 200 dialogs manually  ... but it would have been terribly uninteresting and boring.

 

Implementing a dialog editor :

So I decided to make a 'dialog editor' (and the appropriate dialog interpretor). It looked like this :

                       

The editor first initializes each dialog with the extracted dialog files and the 'control bytes' that I could understand, and then is able to display them graphically. But it's only an initialization. Then you have to select each NPC (names on the right of the screen) and re-work manually his dialog to make it fully functional. You use the icons on the left toolbar to represent such or such action.
I re-worked the first 10 of them before I gave up definitively.

As a matter of fact, I found one day (or was it late at night ?) that other people were also porting U6 ! When I had a look at their work - for instance "Nuvie" or "U6 on-line" - all my work appeared to be useless !

 

...The portage ended that night. The only thing I made afterwards is a resource extractor. You can still download the extracted files.

 

U6 Main