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Dialink :D

A Godot 3.2 plugin to easily handle dialogs in your game.

Content

1. Install
2. How to use the new DialogSystem node
3. Your first dialog
4. Complete structure of the JSON file

What this plugin isn't

• This plugin is not a Node2D nor a Control node that will display dialogs
• This plugin is not (yet) a dialog editor

Then what is it?

This plugin is useful if your game needs to handle multiple dialogs with multiple choices and/or conditional branching (it also handles simple linear dialog as well ;) ).
Under the hood, the new DialogSystem node will take care of the logic of your dialogs.
Once everything's set up, you just have to ask the node what to display next.

Install

From github:

Download / clone the project somewhere on your computer

git clone git@github.com:Eptwalabha/godot-dialink.git

Then copy the addons/dialink directory into the addons directory of your project.
Finaly, activate the plugin Project>Project Settings>Plugins.

From the Godot asset library

The plugin is available here.

1. Directly from the godot editor, open the AssetLib and search for Dialink under the Tools category.
2. Once the plugin's popup is opened, click download then install.
3. The Package Content popup should open, uncheck everything but the addons/dialink directory and its content (if you skip this step, you might end up with unwanted scenes/tests).
4. Click ok
5. activate the plugin Project>Project Settings>Plugins.

You can now access the new DialogSystem node.

Quick tutorial

Add the new DialogSystem node to your scene:

Once the plugin is activated, you should see a new DialogSystem node in the node list with the following icon:

Add it to your Scene (you can add more than one).

Set up the new node

In order to work, you need to provide the new node with a JSON file where all your dialogs are defined. For the sake of this tutorial, we'll use the following JSON file (my-simple-dialog.json):

{
    "dialogs": {
        "hello-world": [
            {
                "text": "Hello my friend."
            },
            {
                "text": "How are you?",
                "choices": [
                    {
                        "text": "Fine, and you?",
                        "then": [
                            { "text": "Very well" }
                        ]
                    },
                    {
                        "text": "I'm not feeling very well today",
                        "then": [
                            { "text": "Too bad" }
                        ]
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

Setting up a new node is as simple as:

var dialogs = $DialogSystem
# set up the json file containing all your game dialogs
# (this can also be done directly from the editor's inspector)
dialogs.dialog_file = 'res://my-simple-dialog.json'
# let start the dialog named 'hello-world'
dialogs.start("hello-world")

That's it, you're all set up!

Let's chat a bit

If you want to know what dialog to display next, just call the next() function:

var dialog_content = dialogs.next()

This will return a Dictionary containing the current line of dialog to display on screen.

{
    'text': "Hello my friend."
}

In this example, calling next() again will return the choices you need to display to your player:

{
    'text': "How are you?",
    'choices': [
        {
            'id': 0,
            'text': "Fine, thank you"
        },
        {
            'id': 1,
            'text': "I'm not feeling very well today"
        }
    ]
}

Call the choice_next(id) function once your player has choosen what to answer:

# let's say the player picked the second choice with the `id` = 1
dialog_content = dialogs.choice_next(1)

Now dialog_content contains the next line of dialog to display:

{
    "text": "Too bad"
}

This is only a simple example, this node can do much much more

Licence

Dialink is provided under the MIT License.