Backwards compatibility of dialogue affecting mods (1 Viewer)

[Slingerbult]

Thanks to the work of Pim, sby and of course modguy among others, we now enjoy a more fully fledged dialogue system than ever before. The problem is that continued requests keep making the mods more complex, and when triggers or variables are deprecated in later versions, dialogues tend to crash.

Now dialogues attract the most interest just after release, but it would be nice to ensure basic functionality at least 6 months forward, regardless of how many loader or dialogue actions versions are released afterwards. I have few ideas on how to solve the problem unfortunately. Perhaps its a passing thing - variables will tend to get streamlined and consolidated and incompatibility issues are to be expected while we're trying stuff out and messing around.

However, as a writer, I get the feeling that relying on more obscure stuff for progression is a bad idea if you want the dialogue to be playable even in the near future. This means less of the cool and fancy stuff will ultimately be used, which is a shame. Anyway, looking forward to your comments on this and I hope we can find a good solution.

 

[Pim_gd]

Not a lot broke.
The most that broke was because I renamed a couple variables. I did that because I don't want to conflict with the dialogue writer's variable namespace (If I take the variable "count" for DA, how many dialogues would stop working properly?)

 

[Slingerbult]

Fair enough, but do you see any problem with this and if you do, can anything be done to mitigate bigger issues down the road?