Getting Started With Dialogic

this video covers many topics i added time codes in the description so it's easier to navigate and if you're new to dialogic this is a good place to start to install dialogic you first need to download it from github the releases are listed here in the releases page for the github repository and then you need to extract the zip and from the extracted files move the folder add-ons to your project then enable the plugin in the project settings you can also install dialogic using the asset library but the version there is not usually the latest one if you already have dialogic installed in your project you first need to disable the plugin close the project remove the existing dialogic add-on folder as the new one open the project again and enable the plugin from the project settings you might get some errors updating from version to version but they usually fix closing and opening the project again now that you have the latest version installed let's go through the basics to create a character you can click here on the new character or right click add character select name in this case shia select a color and you can now write the description for yourself or start adding the images the different display name is probably going to change in dialogue 1.2 so i won't cover it right now so the portrait that you choose the default one is the one that's going to be loaded always whenever you add the character in this case i have several examples which is the default let's add a new one let's add the angry one and let's add the shock so these are the three portraits that you have on this character and if your character is too big or too small you can change the scale here which will be represented in game you can change the offset x and y which will change how it will look relative to your dialog and you can also mirror the portrait to show it mirrored that's pretty much it with the characters let's go with themes themes are really powerful but they don't have all the options you might want yet i'm adding options every time i do an update so stay tuned for more you have all these different values which you can customize your dialogue and show it in a different style the most common mistake is making a very very tiny pixel art game and forgetting about making the dialog box smaller so you can change these values and make it look smaller you'll also have to change the font if you want to make it look smaller but i encourage you to experiment with the themes because there are a lot of options that you might want that make the dialogues look really personal to your story you can rename by double clicking on them and setting the name you want and if you have several teams and you don't know which one dialogic will pick you should go to settings and here you have the default theme in timelines is where you write the story of your game you have all these events main events logic timeline related audio and godot and those are the building blocks you use to display different options so in this case we want to add the most basic event which is the text event and say hello youtube and we have here a timeline let's name it like first so this will be our first timeline and let's add it to a game there are two ways to display dialogic in your game the first one is going to the addons folder then select dialogic and drop this dialog to your scene it doesn't matter where you place it dialogic will be placed automatically at the bottom of the screen and here you can select the timeline that you want in this case we only have one which is first so now if we test this scene we will see our hello youtube dialogue but we have a character how can we show that character you can select here and then select shia and you will see the different options of the states of how you want it to show and let's select the angry one and this is not gonna be displayed but i will show you why if we test it we see that the name here is properly with the color of our character but we don't see the portrait what happened well dialogic is not going to be adding the portrait for you so you need to choose when you want to show them you might want to have the character speaking and not being in camera or you want to add it to your scene so in this case let's make it join you can drag and drop here and now we need to make it to join and select the position you can also set an emotion or a portrait so if you want it to show in a angry way and you hear it don't want to change it this will show up angry already you don't have to change it in this event and you can also mirror it just in case you want to show it on the other side but looking to the left or to the right so let's see how this looks okay so we see the portrait now the project is super big so that's not good let's go ahead and make it smaller let's go to dialogic and here we have the portrait is the scale 100 that was way too big let's go to 25. sometimes your artists send you the sprites way too big because they like to work with other resolution and you might need to do this okay so we have the character now in 25 of its size it's still a bit to the left so let's add some x offset let's add like 70 to the right and here we have it we have a portrait and he's saying something if you want some character to leave the scene you have the character leave which you can select one character or all characters the next thing you will probably want are options and in this case we have them here in the logic section the question event you can set a question with as many options as you want in this case we want no one which is the narrator but you can also make it so a character say ask the questions to say is shia okay and let's say we say yes or no those are gonna be the options but if you want to add more you can always drag and drop another choice event that's it maybe okay so this works like basic indentation but if you don't know everything that is inside of this will be the conditional and everything that is under one of the nodes is gonna be the text that will show up whenever you select one of the options so in this case we select the yes option if you want and if you don't want to drag and drop all the time whenever you create new events it will show up after the selected event so in this case yes so if you say is okay yes let's make him say actually yes now if we want to say no let's say she will say gonna be angrier still and say i'm not and if you say maybe let's add via confused or shocked and say okay so we have three different portraits and with the question depending on which one we pick one of the other will happen try it out hello youtube is she okay yes no maybe no i'm not okay and when i press next everything will fade but it's super sloppy like everything got deleted so let's add a new event which is close styler so after all the options are over we close the dialog and how long it will take for the failed animation one second seems okay which is the default so again we ask is it okay yes okay actually yes it's now with the default portrait and after finish it all fades out now let's cover another way in which we can add the dialog in this case we added it just drag and dropping the dialog node to the scene and selecting it the timeline here but you might be doing this programmatically and maybe you have everything in code or you want that the dialog shows up when you're speaking to a character something like that so let's go to the node in this scene and add some code this code right here will make it so that when it's ready the new dialog which is the instance that we create with dialogic dot start will be this timeline the first one if you don't know the name of your timeline or it's very long you can right click and copy timeline name and then you can paste it here and then we add a child to the node because if we don't add the child we will not see the dialog the dialog is a scene like any other godot scene so when you create it you need to add it and this way even if we don't have the dialog here when we try the game we see the dialog once we have everything here we can start connecting signals dialogic will emit a signal with every event one at the beginning of the dialogue and one at the end most of you are asking how to connect signal when the dialog ends so let's cover that right here so we selected the dialog we connect the timeline and signal of the dialog to this same script and this function that you want this can be anything you want so in this case it's after dialog and it will return the timeline name that way if you want to do something if the timeline was one or the other you can do so and it will print now you can resume with the game so let's try it out let's see when we finish the dialogue now you can resume with the game okay so that means that the signal is properly connected make sure that you're connecting the dialog that you're adding to the game i've seen many of you connecting signals to nodes that don't exist or stuff like that so make sure that you're connecting it properly if you want more flexibility you don't want to use the inbuilt ones there's this event which is called event signal what emit signal will do you will emit the signal dialogic signal and it will pass an argument in this case is whatever you type here so let's say that when you set here to know we can type user clicked no so in this case whenever we get to here dialogic signal user clicked no to connect that we create this dialogic signal with a function that we want in this case i'm going to call it the same and it will take one argument which will be what you wrote here so if you want to check you have to check for the if the argument is equal to whatever you wrote there let's print nope let's try it out and when we press here no it says nope okay so this is working as expected remember that this is not the name of the signal you're connecting this is the argument that you're passing to your signal the last thing you need to know are definitions which will be probably renamed to values in the next version but i will cover that in another video you have some events you have here conditionals it can get very complicated but the best way to learn about dialogic is trying it out try to play with what every event does let's see how it looks in game and you can always remove it try it again you can make backups or create a test project to do whatever you like pretty simple to use and you can do very powerful stuff and it will only be getting better thanks to many people like you so if you want to help on github i'm always happy to see what your ideas are if you have proposal you can create an issue if you are having issues with that and you need some help you can also join my discord and ask there there are a lot of power users able to help you and i hope the dialog can help you build your game as always thank you very much to my patreons really appreciate you sorry for not uploading that often but if you really want something i'm always available on discord so see you

Channel: Emi

Views: 28,284

Keywords: dialogue, dialog, godot, visual novel, how to, timeline, signals, characters

Id: sYjgDIgD7AY

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/doogragdaba]

Thanks again for such an awesome project. Open source = apes stronger together.

[u/Richard_Ballski]

Amazing work! I will definitely keep following this

[u/MightyMochiGames]

You’re a boss!

[u/yesnicknameneeded]

That's awesome i will definitely add it to my godot. Thank you.

[u/kalmakka]

That is a very nice piece of work. It's pretty cool how extensible the Godot editor is.

Bundled along with some system for save games, I think this is well on its way of making Godot just as good as RenPy for making simple visual novels. And considering how much better Godot is at a lot of things that RenPy really struggle with (like creating any form of UI), this could become quite huge.

I've been playing around with it for a few hours, and am thinking of making some contributions. Being able to organize your objects, particularly the timelines, in folders seems like something that would help a lot. Being able to access the return value of "Call Node" dialog-events also seems like something that could make scripting quite a bit easier.

Do you have any thoughts on where you want to take the project?

[u/atn_games]

Hi I got an error saying there was no definition file, creating a new one. And then nothing appeared.

Is it because my Viewport is 400 x 300

Or because 3.3 ?

[u/Less_Consideration52]

hey how can i change the defenitions trough script

[u/amd3ano]

i can finally run hello world on godot 3.3

[u/Dry-Discipline542]

I'm so glad I found this plugin, I was using Ren'Py but it started lagging and so I had to stop progress on my game, then I found Dialogic and since I already used Godot I've integrated my games to dialogic. This is very cool. Good work!