"Hub-based conversation" - What's this?

Hub-based conversation is an alternative approach to traditional branching structures (graphs or trees). "Hubs" are anchors in the conversation where it branches out. At the end of individual conversation threads, the flow can jump back to the hub. The idea behind hub-based dialogues originates in multiple-choice dialogues where players can "click through" all the options and always return back to the choice of initial sentences.
In articy:draft, this return is realized by using a jump element.



To make the jump-hub concept even more flexible there are some important facts:

• You can use jumps and hubs not only in dialogues but every where in the flow.
• A jump and it's target, the hub element, does not have to reside inside the same hierarchical level of the flow. You can jump from anywhere in the flow to every other element throughout the entire flow.
• The jump target does not even need to be a hub element. You can also chose flow fragments, dialogues or dialogue fragments as jump targets.

Anatomy of a "hub" object

A hub is a very simple flow element. It just contains a display name (visible in the flow editor) and a description (only visible in the property sheet). In addition to this, you may apply a template to an hub to attach your custom properties to it.