Dialogic -- Powerful New Dialog Add-On For Godot

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here again from scratch today we are looking at a very interesting project for the godot game engine it is called dialogic and this was just released late last week what this is all about is an open source project for enabling you to do conversations and dialogues in your godot powered game and it is a pretty powerful tool as we are just about to see now it's available up on github it's under the mit open source license and we will come back to this webpage in just a few minutes i'm gonna do mostly a hands-on presentation here so if you want to get dialogic up and going what you want to do is come to this repository again it is available right here i will link that in the linked article down below so don't worry about that one too much but go to the releases right here and you're gonna have to scroll on down down down down down and grab the zip file right here once you have that zip file you're gonna wanna go ahead and create a new project so we'll do that right now of course that goes in my temp folder because where else would it go and we will call this one dialogic youtube demo all right create that folder and create our project we're halfway there so now what we got to do is somewhere in our project we'll go ahead and click the res folder and we'll open the file manager we're going to be creating a new directory here called add-ons now what you want to do download that zip file i talked about earlier on it is available right here navigate into it until you find the add-ons directory copy that folder and then go back to your newly created project and paste it oops that was not paste that was paste all right so once we pasted it in we are like nine tenths of the way there uh so there you now have an add-ons folder inside of you've got dialogic so you head on up here now by the way there's also in the future you should be able to grab it this way asset lib and dialogic and you search for that and you will find it unfortunately what you will see is this is version 0.9 we were dealing with 1.0 so the version in the asset lib is always going to be slightly out of date because it takes longer to commit up there so now that we've got that in here go to our project go to our project settings go to plugins it will automatically detect dialogic and we'll hit enable now notice this space right here we click enable and now we have a new dialogics category all right we'll go ahead and close that we'll create a new scene this is my super scene we'll save our scene and we'll save that as superscene.tscn doesn't matter what kind of scene it is it is now loaded so here is our project and now we can start using dialogic it is all configured there is one setting for the entire project and you get to it by using dialogics right here now you're going to notice on my setup that some of these things are a little squeezed and that is sadly because i am running at 4k with dpi scaling and this project doesn't seem to handle it well so it makes some of the dialogues look a little bit ugly if you want to go ahead and fix that it's fairly simple what you do basically is go into the add-ons folder dialogic and then you can basically find uh the main thing here is all under editor so each one of these editors the editor view is the first one it's this tscn file cool thing is this is a project created in godot so here you can see the initial so what we just want to do is grab that guy and we will set its minimum size to double what it is now so 360 and we can just save that and then we can do the same thing we're also going to find under uh it was timeline editor all right so you're gonna open that guy up as well right so so this folder over here this this timeline right here which is this scroll container over here just do the same thing set the minimum size to double hopefully the author can fix this so that it works well on 4k or high dpi displays which are becoming more and more common but if you need to redesign resize the various different controls you will notice this entire project is implemented just as um a good of project inside a good deal unfortunately for it to commit i do believe i have to quit out so go ahead and save that guy and we will open it back up so this should automatically load our project and it should now work better at our resolution let's open up super scene all right there we go let's go to dialogic and now you see we have a bit more space which is nice now let's go ahead and we'll maximize this guy out this is where we're going to be doing most of our work now you've got a number of different options here you can create timelines characters definitions and themes let's start by creating a character each one of these corresponding things is available through the icons right here let's create a new character and this first character is bob dole and you can go ahead you can set a color for bob dole like so you can you can set a description this is bob dole so this is how you populate the npcs in your world uh you can give a icon to that character which i will go ahead and do right there uh so that is bobbed over we're going to create another character here well we'll make laura let's make this one satan and satan is well red was used we'll make satan blue and he is i am not bob dole bob dole's bob dole and give him an icon there we go so he's got his own picture as well i think this graphic may be the most overused icon in the history of the world all right so we go we got our two characters satan and bob dole uh now what we can do now we can create a definitions this is something that we don't really need right now but you can create a variety of different variables here we're not going to touch on that one instead what we're going to do in the heart of your world all of these these dialogues or dialogic things they are timeline so that's what we're going to do we're going to create a new timeline and we'll call this one conversation with satan actually we'll go with stan i think that's kind of funny all right so there we go stands in here and then here's all of our various different options for the world so we're going to start here a text so right away we're going to have one of the characters speak right here we'll pick it bob dole and it'll say what's up satan and then satan will reply go back over here so we'll do another text event and we will pick the character there and we'll pick satan and satan will say what's up bob just chilling be having a bud all right don't didn't mean to press enter so i'll go back to a single line having that you there kind of bothers me all right and then we'll do one more text event whereas bob will respond true true all right there we go so that is very simple it's going to be just a straightforward conversation between the two of them where we've got bob dole talking to satan and satan responding back to bob dole uh once we are done with that we can go ahead and save that out we're good here so now let's go over to our project and show you how to use a dialogic scene which is pretty simple we're going to go ahead and add a script to this guy all right defaults all look good let's get everything from there on out and what we want to do is do var dialogue equals dialogic dot start and then we just pass in the name of our timeline uh what did i call this guy a conversation with satan okay let's go back here conversation with did i call it stan i stand it didn't i conversation with stan yeah okay that was on me so conversation with stan like so and dialog dot no no i think that's all i need to do oh no so now i go add child dialogue so now we're just basically we're creating a new dialogic conversation and we are adding it to our theme so go ahead and our sort our scene i'll go ahead and run that and yep that's our default go ahead here we go so we got bob dole hey what's up satan and we click here to go continue forward or we do the action key i didn't see it in response back what's up bob just chilling bee having a bud and then finally bob replies back true true and we are done now if you want to customize the look of everything we just saw there that's how easy it is to add dialogues into your world but there's a lot more power at play here go back here to dialog dialogic and we'll show you a couple of the other options here so we can go here we now have a question being asked so um what is your favorite color and then the answer are blue or pizza all right there we go we got branching questions in there and then we can start doing conditions based off of which one they choose so if they chose blue uh actually we'll do it on pizza so there they chose pizza so now we'll do another text event and we'll pop that in there and then we can just grab it and drag it under the pizza choice and we'll do a response of you're an idiot that's not a color all right and you're gonna notice we have a number of different other objects down here we got branching values that we can do we can have character join in and leave out of the conversation you can pick where they are in the slot you have multiple different characters in the conversation uh we could switch to a completely different timeline so if we had it branched we could do multiple different timelines and branch between them we can actually trigger off seas event and then let's say at the very end of this we want to shut everything down we'll do a closed dialogue we'll put that at the end there and that will close it all down and we could also play some music or play some background music at various different points in here and even cooler thing is you can actually emit out godot signals so all kinds of things if you're new to godot everything in godot including like a node 2d here if we come down over here you'll notice signals so you got all these different events that happen all different kinds of things so for example if i drop a sprite here let's let's abuse our our icon some more you'll notice here this particular icon or the sprite has other signals attached well you can actually from dialogic you can actually trigger off any signal you wish which is really kind of cool you basically just put the the node name and the signal name in the code and it will fire that one up gives you a lot of power and flexibility of what you can do here you can also change variables so you can set variable values here and have them uh run and commit and change so if you had um if you wanted to say reduce the person's reputation or you're doing a sales thing and you want to take away their gold but give them an item you can actually run that kind of logic right here in this guy so there's a lot of power of what you can do here so with our new example set up let's go ahead and run this so now we're going to see uh what's up satan what's up bob true true what is your favorite color and you got a choice and we'll go ahead and choose pizza and it says you're an idiot that's another color and then we close the dialogue down and that is that is as easy as dialogic gets it's a really cool and powerful tool for creating these kind of conversation things now you may have noticed in everything i was just working with that there's a lot of decisions made for you on how things look well that is where themes come in so let's go ahead and create a theme and here you can see you can set up various different themes and you can control now the the layering of this guy doesn't look great on this display it scrolls and so on once again this comes down to 4k i think if you run this on a non-high dpi monitor it looks a little bit better so you can change the font that is displayed all the various different values for the text you can change how the character names show up you can change how the dialog box shows you can also change uh the action key being used to advance things on so if i want to do space bar instead i could change that out we can change the button choices and so on available right here and yes you got control over how everything looks you'll notice also in the preview text you can use bb code styling and you can also use special effects in it and you can see there the button advanced you can change that button out uh where is that right here so the next indicator you can change that guy out have a different value right there uh but i don't have any pings and i'm not going to put actually yeah i am let's abuse the hell out of it i think uh so not getting real-time preview there but i think if i go ahead and run this yeah so you see you can change the icon out that you use for advancement and yeah that is heavily of using the godot icon so that is a real quick look at what dialogic is all about now let's head on back over to the website of things and here we are so you've got a bit of a walkthrough of how to use it this is open source as i mentioned it's under the mit source code license when you export your project out make sure you add json and config to the uh resources for when you're doing your export or it won't work right i've got some basic walkthrough of the different properties there um so you've got a number of different functions available to you so like i said you could get and set variables um and those variables are available in the timeline uh as we saw in the conversations so you can set values right here uh and then uh you can switch between timelines that's kind of what i did that is dialogic a really cool project for the godot engine for doing conversation trees uh yeah not really much more to say it's pretty straightforward hopefully i demonstrated it effectively let me know what you think of dialogic and uh yeah i'll talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 18,692

Rating: 4.9757576 out of 5

Keywords: Addon, Conversation, Dialog, Dialogic, Game Development, GameDev, Godot, Godot Engine, NPC, Open Source, Tutorial

Id: QXm0L-QSXoQ

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/my_lesbian_sister_gf]

Absolutely amazing, i feel kinda sad cause i am currently working on my own system for my company next game and i feel like i am outdated compared to this, kinda makes it feel pointless to keep working on it haha

But this project is a baby of mine since my conclusion project at university, so i will not give it up so easily

And i love this project is fully open source, i may study it to try and improve my own(which will be open source too)