Coms System

Demo Video

This product is a simple communications system that lets you organize and control what messages the player sees. The core part is the Message Handler, an actor that you submit your communications requests to as you need. This system will queue up the submitted requests into a backlog making it easy to have a long conversation with multiple messages automatically play in order, even if other sources submit their own requests while this one is playing.

Next is the priority sorting. Coms submitted have priorities, low priority coms will only play if nothing else is playing and wont be put in the backlog. Good for random background chatter. Medium priority values will if something else is playing beyond background chatter go into the queue, but sorted in that queue based on their priority. If you have 3 priority 2 messages, one playing two in backlog and submit a priority 3 message, that priority 3 message would go into the backlog but be the first one to play now once the currently playing priority 2 message finishes.

And then Priority 4, the maximum priority that plays right now no matter what. With this you could have some character talking about a relevant lore moment in your level, only to get replaced by someone shouting about some big key event the player triggered. After all players might take trigger something faster than you expect while there's other dialogue going on, can't always wait in queue or pre plan for this. This system just helps you more easily organize and sort the communications in your level. You can always be submitting bits of background chatter for example, they just get ignored if there's anything more important going on. You don't need to coordinate all other actors and sources of coms carefully, this central system handles that itself.

Documentation