As everyone knows Crysis has a feature rich Dialogue System including support for all kinds of facial expressions and lipsync. The trouble starts though as soon as you try to make dialogues nonlinear: the integrated system only allows Dialogues which run straight from top to bottom.

Since interactive dialogues will play an important role in open Outcast we had to find a better solution. Together with our Game Designers we set up following feature list for our own implementation:

• Dialogue flow is nonlinear (influenced by chosen options and logic / Lua scripts)
• Dialogues are defined in XML files
• Translation support
• Different camera modes that are configured over a config file
• Triggering actions that can be defined using the Flow Graph System of Crysis
• Starting sequences and optionally resuming the Dialogue again after they finished
• Support for Lipsync and facial expressions
• Providing simple Flow Nodes so Leveldesigners can integrate Dialogues easily
• Skipping lines of the dialogue