Dialogic 2 Documentation

This tutorial teaches you how to install Dialogic and gives a quick overview of the necessary elements you need to know for making a dialog appear in your game.

📜 Content

• 1. Installation & Activation
• 🚧 How to install the latest WIP Version 🚧
• 2. Meeting the editor
• 3. Creating a timeline
• 4. Creating a character
• 5. Adding the dialog to your game
• You have got started!

1. Installation & Activation

Dialogic 2 requires Godot 4.2 or higher. If you don't know what version you have installed, take a look at the bottom of your Godot Editor.

Let's install Dialogic 2:

• Download the ZIP file here for your desired Dialogic version: GitHub Dialogic Releases.
• Extract the addons folder from this ZIP-file, it contains Dialogic.
• Move the addons folder to your Dialogic project folder.

Now, let's verify you have correctly installed Dialogic:

• You have this folder path res://addons/dialogic
• Head to Project > Project Settings
• Click the Plugins tab.
• Tick the enabled button next to Dialogic.
• Restart Godot

🚧 How to install the latest WIP Version 🚧

2. Meeting the editor

You can now access the dialogic interface by clicking the new tab at the very top (next to 2D, 3D, Script and AssetLib).

You will be greeted by the dialogic home screen. At the top you can see the different editors dialogic has, at the left a sidebar that will contain recently used characters and timelines.

In the top right, there are some helpful buttons:

• Add Timeline
• Add Character
• Reference Manager
• Play Timeline

We will start by using the first one.

3. Creating a timeline

To create a timeline you press the Add Timeline. You will need to select a folder to put the timeline in and enter a file name. Timelines will be saved as *.dtl files.

Once you hit Save, you can start adding events from the panel at the right of the editor.

Tip: You can learn more about each event and its settings by right-clicking on an event and selecting Documentation.

If you like, you can switch to the text editor by clicking on the Text Editor button at the top right. You can find out more about writing timelines in text format here: Writing timelines in text format.

You can test the timeline by clicking the Play Timeline button at the top right.

4. Creating a character

To create a new character, press the Add Character button on the top right.

As for timelines, you need to select the place to save to and a name.

Once your character is created, you will see the character editor. This editor has four main sections.

You can learn more about portraits, custom portraits and the character settings in this tutorial: Characters & Portraits

5. Adding the dialog to your game

The last important step is to actually have this dialog show up in your game.

For that, we need two things to happen:

• A) having nodes that can display our timeline and
• B) start the execution of the timeline.

Luckily for us, Dialogic provides a method that does both of those: Dialogic.start(timeline_name_or_path)

So the code to start your dialog when an input is pressed could look like this:

func _input(event: InputEvent):
    # check if a dialog is already running
    if Dialogic.current_timeline != null:
        return

    if event is InputEventKey and event.keycode == KEY_ENTER and event.pressed:
        Dialogic.start('chapterA')
        get_viewport().set_input_as_handled()

You have got started!

Congratulations! You now know the basics of Dialogic. There is much more to learn, though. Here is a list of tutorials you might want to explore next:

• Writing timelines in text format
• Characters and Portraits
• Creating timelines in code
• Styles and Layouts