ResidualVM: Week 5

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This week's work nearly blew my mind...

So, it is finally the time to bring the conversation log back to The Longest Journey, which is another pretty complex menu in the game. In the conversation log, players may view all the past conversations they encountered. What makes this menu extremely complex is that it is completely dynamically data-driven generated. Based on your previous action, the conversations could be different. This means that retrieving all widgets of the current page at once is not working since you don't know for sure how many widgets there will be.

Worse still, this menu actually contains two submenus: the Index and the Content, which means I am actually implementing two menus on one trail. And just when I am typing this blog I suddenly realize that it won't be difficult to actually separate them as two distinct menus, damn...

The Index of Conversation Log

The Content of a Dialog

The mechanism of recording conversations has been implemented in the existing engine, so my job is just to retrieve them and properly render them on the screen. Wrapping the texts as classes and widgets has become handy for me, but the hard part is that I need to find a way to dynamically generate the layout of those texts.

In the game's data, there are two entities called IndexFrame and LogFrame, which contains damn only the bounding box of the layout. My way of using them is simple: A Point is used as the rendering position of the current manipulated text. The height of the built text will be used to check whether rendering this text in the current position will exceed the box. If not, put it in an array for rendering, update the next position and go to the next round, otherwise, this page is finished. It sounds simple, but it needs more efforts than before to make the logic clear and maintain a good structure.

No code pic this time, for the reason that it is really not something that can be shown with a few lines of codes. Anyway, implementing this conversation log menu is really a hard bone, way more complex than last week's work. But challenges make things interesting, aren't they? Although my brain nearly exploded and I literally dropped one commit to rewrite it in the process, I actually enjoyed myself and found the feeling of accomplishment. That's what makes GSoC valuable, I believe.

Well, it looks like the task of implementing the menu of The Longest Journey is in its last phrase. I am still not sure what to do next. We'll see.

By the way, tomorrow (June 18th) is the Dragon Boat Festival in China. If you see this, go have some Zongzi, will you?


For the detailed development of the codes, please refers to the Pull Request on GitHub.

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