Support embedding dialogue in a scene file

[wjt]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We run game-making workshops where learners learn through contributing to our game. One way they can contribute is to make a new level: a learner can duplicate a template scene, modify it to their needs, commit, and send us a pull request.

Suppose the template scene (res://template/level.tscn, say) has a node which references a DialogueResource (res://template/npc.dialogue, say). The problem we face is that, to new Godot users, it's very surprising that if you duplicate res://template/level.tscn, it does not duplicate the dialogue: the copied scene references the same dialogue file. So it's very common for the learner to accidentally modify the template dialogue rather than making a copy and modifying that.

We try to work around this by having the learner duplicate the whole res://template directory to res://new_level, and then open res://new_level/level.tscn and update the DialogueResource reference to point to res://new_level/npc.dialogue. This turns out to be almost worse if they forget to update the reference: now they can see that they've duplicated the dialogue in the FileSystem tree, so they think it's safe to modify; but if they open res://new_level/level.tscn and click on the DialogueResource in the inspector, it edits the wrong file.

Describe the solution you'd like

For built-in resource types like SpriteFrames, it's possible to make them local to the scene they're used in, so that they're stored in the .tscn file as a sub_resource. Similarly for GDScript: it's possible to make a "built-in script" where the script text is stored as a sub_resource in the scene file. In both cases, duplicating the scene also naturally duplicates the embedded resources: there is no surprising-to-newcomers linkage between the two.

It would be great if it were possible to do the same thing for dialogue: store it directly in the scene file. While this would be bad for reuse, and bad for editing in an external editor, etc. etc., it would be really great for our use-case of template scenes. (Having duplicated the scene, the level designer might later choose to save their implicitly-duplicated dialogue to a separate file; but the key point is that doing the simple thing would also be the right thing.)

Describe alternatives you've considered

We have a template-duplicating plugin that duplicates a folder containing a scene and various resources (including dialogue) and then rewrites the scene to reference the duplicates of each resource rather than the original. This is tedious to code, difficult to get right, and requires the learner to use Project → Tools → Create quest from template… rather than the really obvious "Scene → Save Scene As…" or right-click → "Duplicate" features that are built in.

Additional context

I don't actually know if this is possible 😄

[mmachado77]

This week I overcoded something for my project...
It's an autoID generator for dialogue files... I was adjusting it so I can show Nathan DM community to check if they could have some use for it on DialogueManager.
I needed super human readable Id's for line's (I'm showing it on balloon for our testers). Also added a bunch of other things that facilitates our game's team.
However, out of Curiosity, I was able to add a script to a 'template_node' that calls my addon to run after saving the node.

Addon Setup

Dialogue Template

When running it (auto via a script add to Node in a 'template' scene)

Final tree

[Fireye04]

Another potential solution would just be to feed in a raw string by default and allow GDM to render it to dialogue, which is built into the plugin out of the box. Then you could also include an empty Resource export for a dialogue file that falls back to the template text when unpopulated.

[wjt]

Thanks to Dex & Hoork on the Godot Engine Discord I now understand that:

1. The reason that I can't use Make Unique for DialogueResource properties in the editor is that GDM includes an InspectorPlugin that shows dialogue specially
2. If I patch that out, then I can easily store dialogue in the .tscn – but what's stored is the parsed form, of course!
3. And then I can't edit it in the Dialogue Manager editor tab, of course!

DialogueResource contains the raw text so I think it would be possible to teach the Dialogue tab to edit a sub_resource of another resource/scene; and similarly possible to extend the editor property control to add the "Make Unique" option.

I think our case is probably uncommon; but is it something you'd consider supporting in the plugin? If so, I can try to get some of my time allocated to this.

[mmachado77]

I wanted to share that I tried solving this in a different way, by building a small addon for my own needs (mainly around human-readable line IDs). Honestly, I probably over-coded it because it also became a nice practice tool for me 😅 — but it turned out to handle this scenario better than I expected.

My feeling is that adding your request directly into Dialogue Manager could bring high risk for what’s a pretty unusual edge case, while my approach stays completely external and doesn’t touch DM at all.

The setup is really simple:

I wrote a node GDScript inside my addon;

attached it to a scene (just a node with the addon script);

and set it up to duplicate the dialogue file to a custom path whenever the scene is duplicated via Scene → Save As.

That’s it — very easy to get working, and it gave me automatic dialogue file copying with zero changes to Dialogue Manager itself.

It works fine for my nerdy use case, but if even one other person finds it useful, I’d be glad to refine it further.
Feedback and contributions are always welcome, and I’ll happily ship it if there’s interest.