Best Practice For Storing RPG Dialogue?

Questions & Answers
1

I am working on an RPG dialogue system where each dialogue line consists of the actual dialogue being spoken, the name of the speaker, and a facial expression for the speaker, if applicable. I have done this by creating the following Dialogue class and creating a public Dialogue list within a DialogueHolder class, allowing me to edit dialogue within the editor.

[System.Serializable]
public class Dialogue {
    public string name;
    public Sprite emote;
    [TextArea] public string line;

    public Dialogue(string n, string l, Sprite e)
    {
        name = n;
        emote = e;
        line = l;
    }
}

However, on a previous project, I used a different approach for storing dialogue. I used a struct, named DialogueLine, instead of a class, and loaded each line from a text file, using semicolons to separate information.

public void LoadDialogue(TextAsset textToLoad)
    {
        int i = 0;
        string[] textLines;

        // Separate the text into lines
        textLines = (textToLoad.text.Split('

'));

        // Add each line to the list
        do
        {
            string[] lineData = textLines*.Split(';');*

DialogueLine lineEntry = new DialogueLine(lineData[0], lineData[1], lineData[2][0]);
lines.Add(lineEntry);
i++;
} while(i < textLines.Length);
}
What I want to know is which of these two methods is better: storing dialogue within the editor or using external text files and reading them in. I can already see some pros and cons of each approach in regards to ease of use, but is there something I’m not factoring in (i.e. performance) that should convince me to chose one over the other?

2

Depending on the size of the project, if it is really small, then just set up dialogues from the editor. In any other case, you will have benefits from loading the dialogue from a resource file (even in case it is small, but then it might not be worth the extra effort).

But what I would do is to make a mixed system: being able to set up from the Editor, but being able to override the setup from the text file. That way you will get the flexibility of quickly changing, testing things if needed, but also the advantages of defining from a text file.

As for using class or struct, there is not much difference between them except for a class being a reference type (can be null, can be modified when passed as normal parameter), while a struct is not.