Line Presenter

Learn about Line Presenter, a Dialogue Presenter that shows lines of text.

A Line View is a Dialogue Presenter 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.

A Line Presenter only displays lines, and doesn't display options. You can use an additional Dialogue Presenter to handle these, like Options Presenter or a custom Dialogue Presenter of your own. We provide a default Line Presenter and Options Presenter.

Showing the Character's Name

If a line contains a character's name at the start, a Line Presenter 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

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

• You can choose to have the Line Presenter 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

The Dialogue Runner will automatically proceed to the next piece of content once all Dialogue Presenters have reported that they've finished with a line.

If the 'Auto Advance' option on a Line Presenter is turned on, then the Line Presenter will signal that it's done with a line as soon as all visual effects have finished.

If 'Auto Advance' is turned off, then the Line Presenter will not signal that it's done when the effects have finished, and the line's delivery will stop.

To make the Line Presenter finish up, you can call RequestHurryUpLine on the Dialogue Runner. This will not end the current line, but will send a signal to all Line Presenters that it should finish displaying its content quickly. To move onto the next line, you can call the method RequestNextLine on the Dialogue Runner.

The supplied Line Presenter has an arrow button at the bottom. Clicking this will call RequestNextLine on the Dialogue Runner:

Inspector

Property	Description
Canvas Group	The Canvas Group that the Line View will control. The Canvas Group will be made active when the Line View is displaying a line, and inactive when not displaying a line.
Auto Advance	If this is turned on, the Line View will finish presenting the line, and then wait. This is useful for games where the user has control over the timing of lines of dialogue. If this is turned off, the Line View will signal to the Dialogue Runner that it's done showing the line once all animations are complete.
Hold Time	If Auto Advance is turned on, the Line View will wait this many seconds after all animations are complete before signalling that it's done showing the line. This option is only available when Auto Advance is turned on.
Line Text	A TextMeshPro Text object that the text of the line will be displayed in.
Use Fade Effect	If this is turned on, the Line View will fade the opacity of the Canvas Group from 0% to 100% opacity when lines appear, and fade back to 0% when lines are dismissed.
Fade In Time	The duration of the Fade effect when fading a new line in, in seconds. If this is zero, the line will appear immediately.
Fade Out Time	The duration of the Fade effect when fading a line out, in seconds. If this is zero, the line will disappear immediately.
Use Typewriter Effect	If this is turned on, the text of the line will appear one character at a time. This will take place after the Fade effect, if enabled.
On Character Typed	A Unity Event that's called every time the Typewriter effect displays new text.
Typewriter Effect Speed	The number of characters per second to display when performing a Typewrite effect. Larger values means that text will appear faster.
Character Name Text	A TextMeshPro Text object that will display the name of the character currently speaking the line.
Show Character Name In Line View	If this is turned on, lines that contain a character's name will display the name in the Line Text section. If it is turned off, character names will not be shown at all. This option is only available when Character Name Text is empty.
Continue Button	A game object that will be made active when the line has finished appearing. This is intended to be used for controlling the appearance of a button that the user can interact with to continue to the next line.