• Creator: Utrecht University ^email
• Publisher: Rage project
• Owner: Johan Jeuring ^email

An author / communication expert can develop a dialogue between a virtual character and a player / user in this tool.

Short non-technical description: A dialogue consists of statements between a player and a virtual character, in which a player choose between various pre-specified statements. The editor balances usability for a non-programming (communications) expert and expressiveness of the constructs in which a scenario can be expressed.

Technical description:

A communication expert / author develops a communication scenario as a directed acyclic graph of steps. A scenario can be used for dialogue in a game /simulation.
The editor has the following basic features:

• Develop a conversation between a virtual character (computer node) and a player as a graph. The graph is from top to bottom in time.
• Choices for a player are as multiple player statements from a computer node.
• Each player statement choice leads to a score, and effects like emotions in the virtual character.
• A statement can have a condition.

A domain expert can then export valid scenarios in XML format. Scripts may be saved locally and imported to modify and continue development.

<p class="asset-property"><span class="text-caption">Detailed description:</span> <p>Conversations can be structured at a higher level of abstractions in subjects. A subject on the horizontal level is interleaving with another subject(s) on the same level. During the simulation a player is presented with statement choices from within these interleaving subjects without a predetermined order. This is useful when a player should communicate with a virtual character on multiple subjects, but the order in which statements within these subjects are followed is not important. A subject may be marked as optional, which means that the subject may be skipped in simulation. </p> <p>Subject variability is augmented with statement variability. In addition to conditionality in nodes, three features that a scenario author may specify on a computer statement are ‘Jump to another subject’, ‘Early end of scenario’ and ‘End of scenario’. </p> <p>A ‘jump’ indicates whether it is allowed to jump from this node to another node in a subject in this interleave level. An ‘early end of subject’ indicates that it is allowed to go from this node to a node in one of subjects at the same interleave level and if there are no other subjects in the same interleave, that it is possible to jump to a node in a subject in the next interleave. An ‘end of scenario’ indicates that the scenario is terminated after this statement. A combination of these features allows for variability and expressiveness in a scenario. </p> <p>A domain expert can then export valid scenarios in XML format. Scripts may be saved locally and imported to modify and continue development. The output of the editor, a dialogue, is stored as an XML file that follows the schema:<br /> <a href="https://github.com/UUDSL/scenario/blob/master/scenarioLanguage.xsd">https://github.com/UUDSL/scenario/blob/master/scenarioLanguage.xsd</a></p> </p>

Date: Jun 30, 2016

Language: English

Access URL: https://github.com/UURAGE/ScenarioEditor

Download: Dialogue-Scenario-Editor.zip