A Dialogue View is a kind of component that receives content from a Dialogue Runner, and presents it to the player. Dialogue Views are how the player sees your game's lines of dialogue, and how they select choices in the dialogue.

A Dialogue Runner can have multiple Dialogue Views. For example, you might have one Dialogue View that's designed to display lines of dialogue, and another that's in charge of displaying options to the player.

Because every game's needs are different, a Dialogue View is designed to be extremely customisable. However, because there are common patterns of how games work with dialogue, Yarn Spinner for Unity comes with some pre-built Dialogue Views that handle common use cases.

This section discusses the pre-built Dialogue Views:

• Line View is a Dialogue View that displays a single line of dialogue in a text box that's inside a canvas, and shows a button that the user can click to proceed.

• Option List View is a Dialogue View that displays a collection of options in a list.

Yarn Spinner for Unity is made up of a number of components. The most important of these are the Dialogue Runner, which loads and runs your scripts, and the Dialogue Views that show content to your player.

In this section, you'll learn about how to work with each of these.

Options List View is a Dialogue View that presents a list of options in a list.

When this view receives options from the Dialogue Runner, it creates an instance of the Option View prefab you specify in the Option View Prefab property, and adds it as a child of the options list view.

Inspector

An Option View is an object that the uses when presenting options. When the delivers options to your game, Options List View will create an Option View for each option that could be selected.

When the Option View is pressed, the Options List View will notify the Dialogue Runner of the user's selection.

Inspector

Line View is a that displays a single line of dialogue inside a Unity UI canvas. When the Dialogue Runner encounters a line in your Yarn Script, the Line View will display it, wait for the user to indicate they're done reading it, and then dismiss it.

Showing the Character's Name

If a line contains a character's name at the start, Line View can be configured to show the name in a separate text view to the line text itself. If the Character Name Text property is connected to a TextMeshPro Text object, then the character's name will appear in this object.

If you don't attach a Text object to the Character Name Text property, you can choose to either show the character name as part of the line (that is, in the Line Text view), or don't show it all.

Presenting Lines with Visual Effects

Line View can be configured to use visual effects when presenting lines.

• You can choose to have the Line View fade in when a line appears, and fade out when the line is dismissed.

• You can choose to have the text of the line appear, one letter at a time, with a "typewriter" effect.

Continuing to the Next Line

You can control how the player can decide to proceed to the next line.

You can set up a Button, or any other Unity UI control, to call the OnContinueClicked method on this line.

You can also make the Line View continue to the next line when the user performs some input:

• If you set the Continue Action Type to Key Code, you can select a key on the keyboard that will continue to the next line on press.

• If you set the Continue Action Type to Input Action, you can create an Action from an input device (such as from a keyboard, gamepad, or other method).

• If you set the Continue action Type to Input Action from Asset, you can attach an Action from an Input Actions asset that you've set up elsewhere.

Inspector

Variable Storage components are responsible for storing and retrieving the values of variables in your Yarn scripts. When a Yarn script needs to get the value of a variable, it asks the Variable Storage for it; when a Yarn script sets the value of a variable, the Variable Storage is given the value.

Each game has different requirements for how variables are stored, which means that Yarn Spinner doesn't make any assumptions how the information is actually stored on disk. Instead, you can create your own custom Variable Storage script that implements the methods that Yarn Spinner needs.

If you don't connect a Variable Storage to your Dialogue Runner, it will create an In-Memory Variable Storage when the game starts, and use that.

Line Providers are components that are responsible for taking the Line objects that the Dialogue Runner produces, and fetches the appropriate localised content for that line. Line Providers produce LocalizedLine objects, which are sent to the Dialogue Runner's Dialogue Views.

When a Yarn script runs, the Dialogue Runne produces Line objects. These objects contain information about the line, but not the text of the line itself. This is because it's the responsibility of the game to load the user-facing parts of the line, including the text of the line in the player's current language setting, as well as any other assets that may be needed to present the line (such as audio files for voiceover.)

Yarn Spinner comes with two built-in types of line providers:

• Text Line Provider is a Line Provider that fetches the text of a line, given a language to use.

• Audio Line Provider is a Line Provider that fetches the text of a line as well as an Audio Clip, given languages to use.

Every game's data storage requirements are different. For this reason, Yarn Spinner is designed to make it straightforward to create your own custom component for managing how Yarn scripts store and load variables in ways that work with the other parts of your game.

Custom Variable Storage components are subclasses of the abstract class VariableStorageBehaviour. To implement your own, you need to implement the following methods:

public bool TryGetValue<T>(string variableName, out T result);
public void SetValue(string variableName, string stringValue);
public void SetValue(string variableName, float floatValue);
public void SetValue(string variableName, bool boolValue);
public void Clear();
public bool Contains(string variableName);

Text Line Provider is a Line Provider that fetches localized text for a line of dialogue, given the user's language.

Inspector

The Dialogue Runner is the bridge between the dialogue that you've written in your Yarn scripts and the other components of your game. It's a component that's responsible for loading, running and managing the contents of a Yarn Project, and for delivering the content of your Yarn scripts to the other parts of your game, such as your user interface.

Setting up a Dialogue Runner is the first step in adding dialogue to your game. To use a Dialogue Runner, you add it to a game object in your scene, connect it to Dialogue Views, and provide it with a Yarn Project to run.

When you want to start running the dialogue in your game, you call the Dialogue Runner's StartDialogue method. When you do this, the Dialogue Runner will begin delivering lines, options and commands to its Dialogue Views.

The Dialogue Runner is designed to work with other components of Yarn Spinner for Unity:

• The contents of your dialogue are delivered to your Dialogue Views.

• The values of variables are stored and retrieved using the Dialogue Runner's Variable Storage.

• The content that users should see - that is, the text in their current language, voice over clips, and other asset - are retrieved using the Dialogue Runner's Line Provider.

Inspector

The In-Memory Variable Storage component is a Variable Storage component that stores all variables in memory. These variables are erased when the game stops.

Inspector

Audio Line Provider is a Line Provider that fetches localized text for a line of dialogue, as well as a localized AudioClip.

Audio Line Provider will automatically use Addressable Assets, if the Addressables package is installed in your Unity project and

Inspector