Hello, I'm just brainstorming ideas on how to implement conversations with NPCs.

I want the kind of conversations RPGs like elder scrolls and Gothic/Risen series have, with several reply options, and each option can lead to new conversation options, quest updates, and/or other NPC interactions such as trading, fighting, following, etc.

My current idea is to create a structure for every chat line, containing the audio and the text for the NPC's line, the player's possible responses and pointers after each reply to new structures of the NPC's text. However, setting these up for every character is fairly complicated, I'm not sure how to do this from DB, and I'm having everything hardcoded at the moment.

I was wondering if maybe someone has different ideas on how to implement this.

I searched for "C++ Dialogue Tree", and found
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4TV-_-Wcw4
maybe this will help you put code to your idea

Take a look at this interesting research paper.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/69325...marcik.pdf

Also have a read here too.

http://www.tads.org/howto/convbkg.htm

I would look at giving your NPC's "knowledge" which could have links to actions or other knowledge. Then dynamically generate the dialog options from the NPC's knowledge as discussed in the paper.

You could even associate an emotion and sensitivity to a piece of knowledge to allow NPC's to have a bit of emotion when talking with them. They would also then know if knowledge is a secret or public for example. Options are endless.