Dialogue: Pass all Dialogue Choices to the Dialogue Message Scene, visible or otherwise

[ch0m5]

Description

Currently visibility property in a Dialogue Choice determines whether the Scene in the Dialogue Message receives that option in the Array of options or not.

However, this incurs an (arguably) unnecessary limitation, which is that non-visible options are inaccessible in GDScript, as in not included in the Array the Scene gets to decide how to process the data in the Dialogue Message.

This prevents the user from processing "unavailable" options altogether, as their data is just not available. E.g., showing the option but "graying it out" to flag it as unavailable, or allowing its selection regardless of conditions in a debug environment.

Implementation ideas

Currently, a dictionary called dialogue_data is passed to the Dialogue Message Scene with the character_name, message, and options keys. Any options that are flagged as "not visible" will simply not be in the options Array.

I propose that options contains every option, visible or otherwise, and extra "visibility" data is added for the user to process it.

• Option A: options Array contains Dictionaries as values, with text and visible keys and String and Boolean values, respectively, reflecting the contents of a Dialogue Choice Node.
• Option B: options Array contains all options and an additional options_visibility Array is added within dialogue_data as an Array of Booleans, reflecting the visibility of each option.

Ideas for alternative approaches are welcomed. The main goal is to make all Dialogue Message/Choice Node data available to the user.

[Naros]

I think Option A is a reasonable way to tackle this, and so I see no reason to over-engineer it.