[Feature Request] Screenplay/Script Writing Mode.

[digiwombat]

Hey Toni, hope life's good.

So I'm back again with another non-trivial feature request! This one would help speed up the writing process a bit for dialogue heavy sequences for me and I'm sure some other people too.

I'd like to see a text-only screenplay/script writing mode. Obviously there are things like Twine and Ink, but without wanting to use their subsystems or an external editor.

My point of reference here is the Decima engine dev tool used by Guerrilla Games. (Pictured bottom right)



Obviously, with branching there are a lot of UX things to tackle, but I think even a basic text-only editor would be a great thing. An easy version could possibly be hacked together by passing the objects through an ink/twine importer/exporter to go back and forth. And it could just not touch any of the sequence/code pieces and leave those for editing in the node editor.

[Tony Li]

Hi,

I can look into that. In the meantime, here are some things that may help:

• Keyboard Shortcuts. You can write linear dialogue (one node after the other) without having to touch the mouse.
• Menu > Outline Mode will switch the editor to a Neverwinter Nights-style outline mode. It's not exactly screenplay format, but it might be a useful interim mode.
• The Dialogue System Extras page has Mografi's JLC Converter. It's an editor window extension that imports conversations from flat text files. Since they're flat text files, you could edit them inside Unity using an in-editor text file editing window extension.

It's tempting to roll the JLC Converter's functionality into the Dialogue Editor itself. But it would only be one direction (from text file into dialogue database) so it's probably better to just wait until I add screenplay writing mode.

Over the next couple of months (as it's a big undertaking), the Dialogue Editor will be getting a huge overhaul to incorporate new features like this while also improving performance with very large databases. If you have any other big list items, please let me know so I can include them in planning.

[digiwombat]

Thanks in advance for giving it a look. And for the potential comment outline feature I asked for before.

And yeah, the NWN editor style never really vibed with me. That tree view just doesn't land in-line with my brain. Haha. And the one-way conversion would be rough for editing and doing sequence work later on. The node editor is still fine, just a slower when I'm writing longer linear branches. I'll take a look at the shortcuts in the meantime since it's always good to learn them.

Other big nice-to-have features I can think of are a proper code editors for the lua fields (though I definitely understand that that's a pain in the ass and it's not SUPER high value since the code is usually simple). An alternative would be a reorderable list, akin to the wizard lua generator wizard, but displays as a reorderable list editor type thing. Probably also a pain in the ass. Basically a nice way to keep syntax safe. But again, low priority for me.

The other thing would be an orderable Sequencer List or preferably more inspector-friendly system for sequences (similar to Fungus or my system pictured below). I did my own cutscene system with Odin Inspector, but obviously that makes life a bit easier for me for slapping editors together but Editor.DrawDefaultInspector and EditorGUILayout.Foldout makes it not too annoying to do something similar with the built-in system.



I'm using the Sequencer system to just call out an run those cutscenes and wait for a message I send when they finish, but obviously I'd love not have to switch between two editors and maybe miss a call somewhere.

And I'll say thanks again for all your hard work on the Dialogue System.

[Tony Li]

Thanks for the suggestions! The big UI update will focus on conversation editing. Later down the road, I'd like to look into improvements for the Lua Conditions and Script fields (automatic syntax validation at least, and possibly turning Lua code back into editable dropdowns) and especially sequences.