Knowing my place

Location awareness is a necessarily component because I wanted to be able to select which conversations and cutscenes to play based on where the player is currently at. 

My initial thought was to manually place trigger boxes all over the map to detect when a character has entered or exited an area. But I eventually settled on a less labor-intensive solution: using the ground mesh itself. 

By separating the ground into pieces and labeling each piece with a custom script, I am able to accurately keep track of who is where at any point in time using mesh collision detection.

Initial tests are promising. The NPCs can now be scripted to respond with dialogues appropriate for their current locations as they move around the map.

Now that the conversation/cutscene system knows how to determine the where, I need a setup and data structure to determine the when - at which point along the plot progression the player is currently at. 

In case you are wondering, the who, what, why and how is provided by the player actions, and NPC motivations (another set of subsystems I have yet to figure out).