Actors

"Do or do not. There is no try" - Said Yoda

Games that don't provide audible feedback or voice overs usually have a portrait and/or the name of the speaker so that the player knows who's saying what.

(Unavowed by WadjetEye Games)

In Dialogue 0.4.1 we introduced a new feature called Actors. These allow to define a character's properties in a self contained object which can then be used in a Dialogue that will feed this information to the UI.

(Example of a Dialogue line with a portrait and the name)

To create an Actor object, right click on the Project panel and select Game Creator → Dialogue → Actor. You can move the newly created object anywhere in your project and organize them as you see fit.

The Actor

The Actor object is a Scriptable Object that contains a number of pre-defined fields. These fields are:

• Name: It can either be a localized constant string or a reference to a Game Creator Global variable.

• Color: A color than can be used to highlight something by the actor, such as its name.

• Avatars: A collection of avatars identified by a name. An avatar can either be:

  • Sprites: Used in an Image component.

  • Textures: Used in a Raw Image component.

  • Prefabs: Instantiated inside the Dialogue UI per dialogue line.

• Gibberish: Settings for an intelligible sound played word-by-word, most commonly used in the early 90s era.

(Example of the Romeo actor, included in the Example scenes)

The most used Avatar system is using Sprites. The other types (specially the Prefabs) might require some knowledge on modifying Unity UI elements to adjust them to your needs.

Using an Actor

Once you have an Actor object you can immediately use it to customize how the Dialogue lines look like. To do so, you just need to drag and drop the Actor object into the Actor field.

(Romeo Actor used in a Dialogue line)

Once you link a Dialogue line with an Actor object, more options will appear below, such as selecting which Avatar to use from the list of pre-defined avatars.