How should I store my Dialogue?

I'm scripting up a dialogue system for my games and I realized that I'm not sure how to store the dialogue itself. It seems like I'd have to write it all up in the scripts. I'd rather put it in a formatted text or binary file and load the data from that. Is that possible in Unity?

How would you reccomend I store my dialogue trees? I'm open to other options, though I've got no budget so I can't afford either of the fancy dialogue systems on the asset store.

 

XML, Text Asset, Scriptable Objects. Those could be used, I'd probably use XML for a dialogue system. If you google unity and XML there will be tons of resources to help you out.

 

XML would be perfect. I'll try googling unity and XML and see what I can find. Thanks.

 

Just sharing a couple things I picked up working on the Dialogue System:

Jacob Pennock wrote a tutorial on using ScriptableObjects for a dialogue system. On the plus side, you can use the Unity editor's Inspector view to edit your dialogue. On the minus side, it's locked into Unity's serialized format, unlike text-based XML.

The Unity Community tutorial on serializing XML might be helpful.

There's also Parley, which has a free version. It generates text files in its own particular format, but it's simple to parse.

If you have a copy of Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2, you can write your dialogue in the toolset and export to XML using Modpacker.

Don't discount spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets. A lot of games still write all their dialogue in spreadsheets. It's easy to import as comma-separated values (CSV).