11 replies to this topic

[Bill Bisco]

By convention, Bioware generally tried to limit choices to 3.  However, in certain situations they had more than 3 responses and in certain situations such as the Wish Spell or the Fate Spirit in ToB.

 

Is there any engine hard limit on the maximum number of responses or lines of of responses to a situation or dialogue?

 

Thanks,

 

Bill

[The Imp]

I don't think so. Of course programming more than 128 responsive option to a "Hey there." dialog start could get a little ... booring.

[Roxanne]

I don't think so. Of course programming more than 128 responsive option to a "Hey there." dialog start could get a little ... booring.

There is no engine limit, as far as I can tell, just the practical issue or readability. Depending on how many lines each response takes there comes a moment where you need to scroll to see more entires - then you need to scroll back to find the entry you want to select...

For *real* dialogues this is rather clumsy, so a better way would be to cascade the reply options. Long lists are really only practicable where it is not a true dialogue but rather a choice list disguised as a dialogue, like e.g. Fate Spirit or Wish or Travel.

[Bill Bisco]

Thank you both. I shall continue modding unabated.

[Sam.]

From a programming standpoint, I would wager the maximum is limited (at a bare minimum) to a signed 8-bit integer (2^7-1 = 127), but is more likely an unsigned 8-bit integer (2^8-1 = 255).  At the other end of the spectrum, it is possible the engine allots as much as an unsigned 32-bit integer (2^32-1 = 4294967295), but IMO this is unlikely.  At any rate, you would really have to try in order to reach any sort of limit.

[Roxanne]

From a programming standpoint, I would wager the maximum is limited (at a bare minimum) to a signed 8-bit integer (2^7-1 = 127), but is more likely an unsigned 8-bit integer (2^8-1 = 255).  At the other end of the spectrum, it is possible the engine allots as much as an unsigned 32-bit integer (2^32-1 = 4294967295), but IMO this is unlikely.  At any rate, you would really have to try in order to reach any sort of limit.

It is more than 127 as there are dialogues (e.g.Finsol01, Fatesp) that have more responses in some states (nearly every NPC mod adds there bit of talk here, even if only those of party members are triggered for display). That means the game can handle such a number, even if conditional responses are not displayed if the conditions are not met. Technically it should be the same.

I have not seen any single state that had more than 255 responses to a single state.

Edited by Roxanne, 15 September 2015 - 12:00 AM.

[Sam.]

I have done some tests, and vanilla ToSC seems to crash when you try to select a dialog response when there are more than 256 options.  The game will display more than 256 options if the dialog has them, but it will crash if you try to select one.  This goes along with my predicted most likely scenario of being limited to an unsigned 8-bit integer, which is zero-based (numbered 0 thru 255 for a total of 256).  It seems BGEE has the same limit of 256, but the crash may not necessarily happen absolutely immediately.  Buffer overflow, maybe?  I wonder if Beamdog would be interested in hearing of this, or if they would bother to handle such an unusual scenario any more gracefully than just a CTD...

[K4thos]

what about situation in which some dialogue responses are filtered out (doesn't show up due to trigger filtering) but are still checked by the engine when the dialogue block is parsed. Will this 256 responses limit also affect for example dialogue with 100 visible responses and 200 hidden?

[Sam.]

what about situation in which some dialogue responses are filtered out (doesn't show up due to trigger filtering) but are still checked by the engine when the dialogue block is parsed. Will this 256 responses limit also affect for example dialogue with 100 visible responses and 200 hidden?

I tried 251 visible responses and another 50 hidden ones in both vanilla ToSC and BGEE, and the dialog worked fine:  no crashes.  Looks like the limitation is to 256 visible responses.  You'd probably run into some other limiting factor eventually, but I'm not sure I care to find it

[The Imp]

I tried 251 visible responses and another 50 hidden ones in both vanilla ToSC and BGEE, and the dialog worked fine:  no crashes. 

You did have the invisible repsonces in the middle of the dialog tree, right. Say 101 visible, 50 invisible, and 150 visible ? While trying say the 291th responce... hihihihiih. Just checking....

Edited by The Imp, 17 September 2015 - 04:08 PM.

[Sam.]

1 thru 250 were visable, 251 thru 300 were invisible, and 301 was visable. I tried selecting 250 and 301.

[The Imp]

Well, that works too.