Building a Custom Dialogue Runner

"Getting Additional Control Over The Dialogue or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Build My Own Custom Dialogue Runner Class"

This page describes advanced usage of Yarn Spinner. Unless you really need total control over how Yarn Spinner works in your Unity project, we recommend using the built-in Dialogue Runner class rather than creating your own.

If you really do need total control, read on!

While for the most part we think the best way to use Yarn Spinner is to use the components provided and replace and supplement them as needed there are going to be times when you need more control over the dialogue itself. In these cases you will need to directly interface with the dialogue and to build your own dialogue runner. This will give you full control over the dialogue and let you control the timing and triggering of important events.

By the end of this guide we are going to have recreated the same scene and code as can be found in the Minimal Viable Dialogue sample.

⚠️ This guide is not for beginners: You should be very comfortable with Yarn Spinner and Unity before using this!

The Depths of Yarn Spinner

Before we can really start building our own dialogue system we need to take a bit of a look at what Yarn Spinner does and how it works currently. The starting point for Yarn Spinner is the Yarn dialogue files themselves, once you have your Yarn files written and ready is where Yarn Spinner takes over. These files get associated together into a Yarn Project, this project reads through and compiles the Yarn files into three pieces:

• strings tables

• metadata table

• binary program

The strings table is a CSV that holds all the text of the Yarn, the actual written dialogue. This isn't strictly necessary and could be stored in other parts of the output of the compilation but by having it separate it allows for easier localisation and proofing. The metadata table is similar, it is also a CSV