The dialogue tag group gives units situational sounds, like when they take damage, see allies die, or are startled. Dialogue usage is not just limited to AI bipeds; it's responsible for the player's death sounds and can even be referenced for vehicles, though not all situations apply. Dialogue is an important part of Halo's game design and helps communicate the internal state of characters to the player.

The randomization of voice lines is not part of the dialogue tag but rather the referenced sound tags, which can contain multiple permutations.

Canonical character dialogue tags

The following stock dialogue tags correspond to canonical characters:

Additional level-specific character sound tags, e.g. for cinematics, can be found under the sound\dialog\x** folders.

Related HaloScript

The following are related functions that you can use in your scenario scripts and/or debug globals that you can enter into the developer console for troubleshooting.

(<void> ai_dialogue_triggers <boolean>)
(ai_dialogue_triggers true)
(ai_dialogue_triggers false)

(ai_print_speech [boolean])

(ai_print_vocalizations [boolean])

(ai_render_dialogue_variants [boolean])

Structure and fields

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following individuals for their research or contributions to this topic:

• 1SDAN (Listing canonical character dialogue tags)
• Kavawuvi (Invader tag definitions)
• MosesOfEgypt (Tag structure research)