What is Dialogue Tree?

Dialogue Tree is a plugin for Unreal Engine 5 that allows you to design and play conversations between the player and NPCs. It aims to be quick to set up, easy and fun to work with, and flexible enough that you can tweak it to suit any vision you have for your project.

Trailer available on YouTube.

Changelog available Here.

Why Dialogue Tree ?

There are a lot of great dialogue plugins out there, so why would you choose this one?

To start with, Dialogue Tree features an expansive, flexible, and visually appealing graph editor. This makes it easy to set your dialogues up, easy to customize the flow of dialogue in your project, and fun to play around with.

Set up is quick and easy, without sacrificing customization. Most dialogue in games follows one of two patterns: the “standard” dialogue of games like Skyrim, The Outer Worlds, and The Witcher, or the CRPG model followed by games like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pillars of Eternity. If that’s what you’re looking for, Dialogue Tree includes templates for each of those setups. Just customize the widget visually and plug it in. Need something more bespoke? The plugin offers extension hooks to create your own Dialogue Controller or presentation template in Blueprint.

The plugin is also designed to be extremely compatible with other plugins and systems. 

Finally, Dialogue Tree is extensively documented, including several detailed tutorials to get you started. Tutorials are available in both text and video formats, and currently cover the following topics:

1.      Quick Start

2.      Dialogue Editor

3.      Queries and Events

4.      Customizing Dialogue

If you want to get a better feel for how the plugin works, I highly recommend you check these out.

Why not Dialogue Tree?

All right then, why might Dialogue Tree not be for you?

First, you may simply not like the design choices I made, which is completely fair. I encourage you to look at the tutorials linked above to see how everything fits together, and if this solution is a good fit for your needs.

Second, and this is the big one, networked multiplayer dialogue is not yet in the plugin. I do plan to create a Dialogue Controller that does this, but there are several smaller quality-of-life features I want to add first. For the moment, if multiplayer dialogue is something you need, this is not the plugin for you. Check back later, and that may have changed.

Finally, I am currently only supporting Windows as a platform, though I will happily consider adding other platforms in future if there is enough interest.

Additional Resources

·        Full information of the plugin’s features, including detailed introductory tutorials, is available on its documentation site.

·        Tutorials are also available in video form on my YouTube channel.

·        Finally, I’ve created a discord server to better answer questions and provide support.

Conclusion

Overall, I think you’ll find that Dialogue Tree offers a fun, accessible, and extremely customizable way to add dialogue to your Unreal projects. As for the rest, I would love to hear what you think. Is there something I should change, a tutorial you would like to see, or a feature I should add? Let me know on discord, or at UnraedGames@gmail.com. In the meantime, best of luck, and happy developing.