Horizons: Empire of Istaria Peek #9

RPG Vault has released the ninth installment to their ongoing "peek" feature for Horizons: Empire of Istaria, this time with Tulga Games' Adrian LaVallee discussing the programming that needed to be done in order to incorporate the quests created by author Peter S. Beagle.
The one hurdle left was how to make sure that two NPCs that were supposed to be having a conversation stay in sync. You wouldn't want to rely on their individual timers - external factors might make one NPC get farther ahead or behind the other, and their conversation would be broken. This was resolved by adding the ability for an NPC to trigger the execution of a persistent action state on a different NPC. That way, they would literally be having a conversation - where one NPC would say something and send a directive to the other NPC to say its response after a few seconds, which would then in turn trigger the first NPC to say the next line after the proper delay.