Firebrand wrote: ↑Tue Nov 05, 2019 10:05 pm
Is there any way to improve this? Making quests more complex, without an extreme overhead of typing, would be an interesting feature. Maybe through that
Visual Quest Editor 
No, what you see is what you get. The only way to write less text is to make fewer text boxes. You can copy over text you've already written and adapt it to new circumstances, but that's not often the solution.
Part of it is also writing
good text, which is harder than people think. It's easy to write insipid dialogue but people get bored of that really fast. For example, in the Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim I actually had to quit because I was literally getting sleepy from the writing:
"What happened? Why won't you go back?"
"It's hard to explain ... I remember those people with the masks coming on board, then ... The next thing I remember, I was here and they were gone. That's not right, losing whole days like that. There's been something strange going on there for a while, but after this ... I'm done. I'm not going back to Solstheim."
"Yes, you are. You're taking me to Solstheim.
"Have you been listening to me? I'm not going back there."
"I'll pay you double your usual rate."
"Well ... a man's gotta make a living, after all. Fine. We'll cast off immediately."
That's horribly bland. Daggerfall's dialogue is written at a much higher standard, and keeping up with that is hard work.
I think a way to edit the text messages in-game for a quest and have it save them to the script would be my ideal. Each edit you make has to be tested in game to see what it looks like. Then again and again and again... so tedious, especially since you need to start the quest again each time.
This is somewhat complicated by players' screen resolutions. Small resolutions fit less text, so you'll still be spilling off the borders even if most players see it right. I've developed a sort of general sense of when the text goes too far or not, and haven't heard any complaints yet, so you can learn it over time.
If that's the difficulty, you may want to just start that quest (or a dummy quest) with the action "say 1011" and put the text into that box. Then you can isolate it and fix it freely.
