Using dictionaries to store dialogues

Unity Engine
1

Hi, I’m trying to create a text based interactive story game. I managed to get the dialogue system running.
I’m using dictionary to store the dialogues along with speaker names, options and a bunch of flags and variables that control the flow of the dialogue system. For each entry in the dictionary I’m creating a new object to store the data. There are also few other functions that handle triggers based on the current dialogue (Dictionary key). This dictionary is initialized inside a class and not in it’s Start() or Awake() functions. Here’s the template:

public Dictionary<int,Quest> quest1dict = new Dictionary<int,Quest>()
    {
        {1, new Quest{speakerName="Suzan:", dialogueText="Hi", opText1=null, opText2=null, opText3=null, opText4=null, op1=0, op2=0, op3=0, op4=0, jmp=0, setcp=0, time=0, reserved=0}},
        {2, new Quest{speakerName="Me:", dialogueText="Hello", opText1=null, opText2=null, opText3=null, opText4=null, op1=0, op2=0, op3=0, op4=0, jmp=0, setcp=0, time=0, reserved=0}},
        {3, new Quest{speakerName="Suzan:", dialogueText="How are you?", opText1=null, opText2=null, opText3=null, opText4=null, op1=0, op2=0, op3=0, op4=0, jmp=0, setcp=0, time=0, reserved=0}},
        {4, new Quest{speakerName="Me:", dialogueText="I'm good.", opText1=null, opText2=null, opText3=null, opText4=null, op1=0, op2=0, op3=0, op4=0, jmp=0, setcp=0, time=0, reserved=0}},
        {5, new Quest{speakerName="Suzan:", dialogueText="Wanna come in?", opText1="No", opText2="Yes", opText3=null, opText4=null, op1=6, op2=8, op3=0, op4=0, jmp=0, setcp=5, time=0, reserved=0}}
    };

I wanted to know, to what extent is this method optimal for an Android game? This will contain A LOT of dialogues in the future (couple of thousands) and multiple such quest lines. Does this have any impact on memory? Is there a better method? Let me know. Thanks!

2

This is the dilemma all programmers face, you can choose to store all your data in a dictionary. This will give you the best performance at the cost of memory. However, I don’t think the user will notice the difference between accessing the quest data from a memory or from disk. I would look into using Scriptable objects and serializing the data to an asset file that can be loaded when needed. Doing it this way also allows you to build new quests with no coding involved.