So I've been toying around a bit with formatting dialogues and here's what I have to show for it:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/User:Sekoia/Sandbox/Dialogue_TestingI have two primary goals here.
The first is that I'm trying to represent the in-game text in a way that's fairly similar to how you'd see it in game. There's a few reasons for this. It makes it very clear that the text is the game's text, and not ours. It allows us to provide both text and response(s) in a way that makes sense. It's familiar since it matches the game. And it stands out, making it easy to pick out dialogue from the rest of the article.
The second goal is that I'm also trying to provide a framework for handling the new branching/flexible dialogue options we see in game. I really don't like the indentation method we've been using for this. Not only does it look (in my opinion) unfinished, but it also doesn't really represent how all of the dialog works in game. In some cases, you don't have a simple tree. In Nance's mission where you talk to Agent G, for example, all of the steps give two options; the second in each case leads to the same destination. I also think I've seen stuff in Praetoria where you can explore a menu of choices and go about them in an arbitrary order; that
can't be represented in a tree. So instead, I'm simply linking things together. Each dialogue window can have an anchor tag. The options in the dialogue windows can link to other dialogues. And a dialogue can also list off what responses might have led you there. This loses some of the visible structure we see in current layouts, but at the same time, that visible structure can't be applied universally anyway.
There's a few caveats with the current design. I'm colorblind, so I don't have the colors perfect. I figured those could be improved later. The link text is in particular difficult to view, but that'll require global CSS changes (doable, but I didn't want to much with the global stylesheets at this point...). Also, it looks best in Google Chrome. It also works in MSIE, but it looks slightly different because MSIE doesn't support using CSS rounded corners. I haven't tested Firefox.
Before I go any further exploring this, I wanted to get some opinions. No point in putting more time into it if it's universally despised.