Unity Visual Scripting (Bolt) vs GraphView vs xNode for Dialogue & Quest System

Unity Engine
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Which one is better for making a dialogue & quest system?

  • Unity Visual Scripting (Bolt)
  • GraphView
  • xNode
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Far as I understand Bolt is all C# in visual form, which seems unwieldy.

Xnode is built on Graph View, and gets you a up and ready system to build on top of, without having to make it all yourself, so I’d use Xnode unless you want the pain of making it all from scratch yourself.

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I would use one of the assets by @TonyLi , who I am tagging in as they will be able to provide targeted suggestions based on your projects needs.

Their assets are used by many commercial unity games for solving the problems you have.

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Unity Visual Scripting is best for making dialogues and quest systems. Bolt has a lot of help and is much more reliable as compared to two others respectively. With out having any programming knowledge whatso ever you can manage creating quests by watching a couple of tutorials.

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Oh I didn’t know that xNode was built with GraphView. I’m just concerned about GraphView, because it’s still experimental and Unity could abandon it since they’ve got Bolt

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I watched Dialogue System plugin videos on YouTube. It seems to have a quest system as well, so I wonder why the creator made Quest Machine plugin?

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Could you please share some tutorial links about using Bolt for dialogue and quest system? I just found the ones using GraphView and xNode

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The Dialogue System does have a quest system. You define quests using a table of entry fields (name, description, subtasks, etc.).

Quest Machine provides a visual node-based editor for quests instead, which some people prefer, and it also has a procedural quest generator that can generate new quests based on the current game world state. The Dialogue System doesn’t have a procedural quest generator. But Quest Machine doesn’t do interactive conversation trees; it shows simpler WoW-style accept/decline windows instead. The Dialogue System and Quest Machine can integrate with each other if you want Quest Machine quests with Dialogue System conversations.

Please feel free to try the evaluation versions and let me know if you have questions.

GraphView is a scripting API. You might need to do some coding to use it. I’m not aware of any dialogue system tutorials that use only visual scripting. Unity does have some good general tutorials on Bolt, however, starting with this one:

Getting Started With Bolt

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Thanks for the details. The procedural quest generator feature sounds really interesting. I will try it out

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Far as I’m aware, Unity’s visual scripting is all moving to use Graph View to have a common foundation. It’s experimental because breaking changes are still happening.

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Hopefully it’s not abandoned as some of Unity packages. Thanks

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GraphView API is already old news. The new kid on the block is the Graph Tools Foundation package. All Unity’s graph based tools will eventually migrate to Graph Tools Foundation. The package version of GTF was semi abandoned a year ago in favor of integrating it into the core of the engine, so all progress is internal only and the package version that’s still floating around can’t compile builds.

i.e. GraphView is on its last legs, despite still being experimental and the replacement is not ready yet. Classic Unity.

EDIT: As for which is best. I also can recommend Tony Li’s tools. Dialogue System has a built in node editor, but it can also import from a wide variety of sources such as Arcweave.com.

You can also go old-school and implement your own editors the traditional way by using IMGUI. GameDev.tv have courses for a dialogue system and a quest system using IMGUI. It’s very unpleasant to use in graph context, however. And large graphs kill editor performance with few options to optimize it. It’s just the nature of IMGUI.

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