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Dialogs and text: machinery, corpus, and the conversion shape

The conversational layer (wave 4 of the mining campaign, 2026-09-16). The working tool is tools/dialog-extract 0.7.1; this document records what it produces, the full-corpus census, and what a Godot dialog system takes from it.

1. The machinery

Dialogs ARE GPL chunks: every conversation is bytecode in GPLDATA.GFF, and every string lives either inline (the 7-bit packed-string codec: 16-bit sliding window, 0x03 terminator, sub-type markers 1 introduce / 2 uncompressed / 5 compressed, lossless since gpl-disasm 0.4.3) or as a reference:

  • GSTR[id] resolves directly against a TEXT chunk (0 unresolved corpus-wide).
  • LSTR[slot] is one of 10 runtime slots written by gpl string copy; the table is GLOBAL across global sub calls (callers populate callee slots), which is the one genuinely hard resolution problem.

String-bearing opcodes: 0x2C log, 0x42 input string, 0x48 menu, 0x4F print string, 0x5A string compare, 0x0A string copy. gpl menu (0x48) is the choice machine: a title, up to 24 entries of (label, same-chunk jump target, availability flag), byte 0x4A terminates; the first entry carries the INTRODUCE intro marker; availability flags are usually LF[n] (asked-once gating; polarity unconfirmed) or literal 1 (always-on goodbye).

dialog-extract resolves strings in three tiers (last-write-wins snapshot; a path-aware CFG walk per entry point; then possible_writers arrays ranked by reverse-callgraph BFS distance for the remainder) and builds a node graph per chunk: entry points (chunk start + local subs + discovered block leaders) -> block nodes (lines, gpl refs, terminator) with if/ifcompare/loop/goto/cross-chunk children preserving the GPL condition semantics. Speakers are tracked via setother/setthing state and the curated syms/speakers.toml; attribution is never invented.

2. The corpus (both games, full runs)

Metric DS1 DS2
String-bearing chunks (of total) 215 of 250 316 of 350
Aligned (full CFG) 215/215 316/316
Strings total 17,699 28,354
Decoded characters 642,269 1,070,025
Inline / GSTR / LSTR 13,930 / 3,514 / 255 22,428 / 5,827 / 99
Unresolved LSTR reads 25 (all computed-writer sites) 7
Dialog-tree entry points 5,571 8,000
Block nodes / displayed lines 29,028 / 19,420 44,956 / 31,952

Every chunk disassembles fully aligned, so every chunk gets a tree. The 32 unresolved LSTR reads match the tool README's number exactly; 30 of them have only computed writers (accumulator-built strings, likely runtime-formatted text) and 2 have cross-chunk inline writers with no static call path (the queued path-aware caller-picking backlog item).

Static text outside dialogs: TEXT pools (arena and NPC names: ids 0..32, 100..118, 200..207; only 7 ids are ever read as GSTR, the rest look engine-side for random naming), DS1 NAME id 1 (322 item names), DS2 TEXT-1000 (255 item names), SPIN spell text, MERR (mostly "Unused..." stubs; DS1 duplicates the set in CINE.GFF), ETME credits, DS2 RNME region names. Speaker census: 215 + 316 chunk-conversations; setother observed on 29 distinct DS1 entities and 9 DS2 slots; creature names resolvable via NAME(-N) into the bestiary.

3. The conversion shape

A Godot dialog system takes:

  1. The dialog_tree node graph verbatim (blocks, line records with {opcode role, source, value, state snapshots}, conditional children, cross-chunk expansions with their unresolved markers).
  2. Menus as choice nodes: ordered (text, target offset, availability-expression) entries against an offset->node map.
  3. Conditions/actions as gpl-disasm token trees: either a small evaluator or precompiled GDScript callables; actions are the non-string opcodes in each block (requests, flag writes, item ops) plus the sub/global call refs.
  4. The state model: 10 global LSTR slots, GSTR backed by TEXT pools, LF/GF flags, LNUM/GNUM, GNAME handles, the setother/setthing speaker registers; the cross-chunk callgraph from gpl-disasm --global-cfg.
  5. The static text assets (section 2), with the 19 packed strings that carry real control codes preserved.

RESOLVED 2026-09-19 (wave 3): menu availability polarity is flag == 1 (nonzero, literally 1) = show the entry, 0 = hide (DS1 0xcbcc, DS2 0xf21e; the evaluator only produces 0/1 in practice). INTRODUCE renders as the current speaker's name: the sub-type-1 string arm appends the combat-array name field of the VM:0x369 combatant into the sink at decode time (gpl-vm.md 0x2C row has the details). The three unused TEXT-pool bands are the engine's RANDOM-NAME banks: a three-case selector (arg 8 -> 1d8 + 199 -> ids 200..207; arg 1 -> 1d33 -> ids 0..32; else 1d19 + 99 -> ids 100..118), position-identical in both games (DS1 ~0x67e8x in ovr19, DS2 ~0x6fcdx in module 17). Still open: whether computed-writer strings should be reproduced or frozen; speaker-mutating opcodes beyond setother.