Enemy attacks protagonist during a dialogue

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Description and Steps to Reproduce on GitHub
Suggestions on how to fix below in this thread

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I think this issue has 2 big parts:

  1. We should make sure Player cannot be attacked while engaged in a dialogue
  2. Player should not be able to start a dialogue when engaged in combat
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The first one, I think, can be solved in different ways. Firstly, we could hardcode a rule into any attack, something like: “do not engage if dialogue is on”. Sounds reasonable, but I’m more inclined to utilize State Machine we already have in place as much as possible and use Condition logic instead, which will allow Game/Level Designers to have full control over the situation

With that in mind, I suggest adding a new Condition that would be responsible for answering the question “Is there any dialogue open right now”?. Then we can use this Condition in the State transition. For example Slime Critter Idle → Alert and “Roaming” → “Alert” transition would be extended with this new Condition. Simply put: “Forbid transition to Alert if there is any active dialogue”.

The logic behind this new Condition would be fairly simple: it will listen to the DialogueDataChannelSO channel, which is transmitted when the new dialogue starts or when dialogue ends. We could then preserve the boolean internal field _isDialogueActive which is changed to “true” when starting dialogue even fires, to “false” when end dialogue event fires. Finally, this **_isDialogueActive** would be the ultimate output of the Condition. Statement.

A few assumptions/possible follow-up issues:

  1. I assume we are ok (for now, at least) with the fact that the enemy can start attacking as soon as dialogue closes. It can lead to some funny situations when roaming nearby Critter immediately attacks the Player after she/he closes the dialogue. As if Player was invisible all this time but now Critter can finally see her/him. We can address this in the next PRs
  2. I also assume there is no way a Player can have more than 1 active dialogue at the time
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I prepared this PR that utilizes suggested approach. Please let me know what you think :slight_smile:

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Hello @gregsolo ! I just merged the PR as mentioned on GitHub. Thank you :slight_smile:

With the new condition(if the the character is not already engaged in a dialogue) to allow the slime critter to move from Idle or Roaming states to Alert state, this solves the first point you mentioned above.

However, currently if the slime is already on the Alert state, the player can still enter a dialogue which leads to your second point: Player should not be able to start a dialogue when engaged in combat.
That’s why currently the team is working on a GameState manager SO that holds the current state of gameplay. The different states are: Gameplay, Pause, Inventory, Dialogue, Cutscene, LocationTransition and Combat.
We are on the combat state if there is an enemy nearby that is on the alert state. In this case the player won’t be able to open Inventory or initiate dialogues. This should solve the second point

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@Amel-Unity Thank you! Would it be possible to participate in this process?

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In any case, here are a few ideas I have.

First, since we need to block interaction with the NPC if Player is in the Combat state, we should communicate this somehow to the player, for example via ui. When player collides with NPC, instead of “E Talk” button we could show “In Combat - Cannot Interact” msg.

Second, there is currently no clear indication that Combat is actually happening. We could use blinking red screen to communicate to Player that Combat is in progress (potentially adding combat music in future).

Both of this could be implemented, I think, before/in parallel with gameplay states. I could start working on this by just assuming “if any enemy is in alert mode, it means Combat”.

What do you think?

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Hey @gregsolo , sorry about the late reply. We had a couple of days off recently, we will get back to you Monday on this to share the progress. Thanks :slight_smile:

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No worries at all, enjoy your weekend :slight_smile:

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Hello! I hope you all here doing alright :slight_smile:

Got a chance to review recent changes today and noticed GameState was introduced. This incredibly helpful, thank you! :):):slight_smile:

Following up on this, I took a liberty to suggest next step towards blocking Player from starting dialogues during a battle.Here is the PR. I don’t know if this is something that is already being implemented by internal team. If not, I hope this will be helpful :slight_smile:

Next step I think should be actually setting game to Combat state when combat starts, happy to look into this

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Added this PR that sets game state to Combat when slime critter detects player

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Hey @Amel-Unity sorry to bother but is there any update on this?

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Hi @gregsolo , Yes @ChemaDmk pushed some changes to main on the GameState but I believe it is still work in progress. Mentioning her here so she can share some updates on the topic :slight_smile:
Thanks

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Hey ! Yes we’re working on that. We have a GameState scriptable object that will prevent the enemies from attacking in certain cases. You can check the solution in Main.