Conversationalist game data transfer

As far as I know, Conversationalists do not currently receive any info from the game via Inky about a player when that player opens up the dialogue. Inky does have the ability to pass variables to/from the game.

Can you please pass the following items for our use in our Inky scripts so we can write dialogue specific to that player.

• Avatars Name
• Avatars Gender
• Avatars Adventurer Level and Producer Level
• Avatars Guild Name
• Avatars current Title
• Avatars 2 Specializations
• Avatars PVP flag
• In game Date, Time, Phase of the Moon, and Current Weather
• If the town is under Siege

If any of this currently exists within Inky, please provide documentation on the variable names so we can access this information for our custom dialogue.

The following documentation and example is directly from the Inky support documents. For further details see RunningYourInk.md document on the Inky support site.

Setting/getting ink variables
The state of the variables in the ink engine is, appropriately enough, stored within the variablesState object within the story. You can both get and set variables directly on this object:

_inkStory.variablesState["player_health"] = 100

int health = (int) _inkStory.variablesState["player_health"]

 

It may even be possible to return data to the game, like to allow a player to join a guild by talking to a guilds conversationalist. This would need some thought though as there are potential abuses when a conversationalist can change avatar data. For example, how does the game know that the player actually wanted/agreed to join the guild. It gets tricky when returning data to the game from the conversationalist, but sending data to the conversationalist shouldn't be a problem. Someone may want to hide their level / specs from other players but even if that data is passed to the conversationalist I can't think of how that would be obtained by the owner of the conversationalist.

 

Long term this could get pretty deep.

Example 1: Passing the items in the players inventory, so as part of a player created quest the conversationalist can identify if a specific item has been looted.

Example 2: Checking gear to see if a player is wearing certain gear, so they can for example identify that the player isn't wearing a ring and then the conversationalist via dialogue recommend a particular vendor to buy jewelry at.

Example 3: Checking player skill levels to make various recommendations or responses.

 

Some players have mentioned possible privacy concerns. As of now I don't believe data passed to another players conversationlist can be accessed in any way by the conversationalists owner. Possibly in the future it could be an issue, for example if you had the conversationalist perform a particular emote if the player was for example specialized in fire. Even with that possibility, the owning player would have to be within view of the conversationalist to learn that information. So its such a niche possibility I don't think its an issue. It'd be more concerning if the owning player could get a log of what occurred when another player accesses the conversationalist.