Writing dialogue
Using Dialogue actions
A Dialogue action () lets you display a new paragraph of text to the player. The text will be presented using the text box you've specified (see Displaying dialogue).
You create new Dialogue actions in the Action window, either by manually picking it from the toolbox, by clicking the Add Dialogue button or by pressing Alt+Enter.
When a Dialogue action has been created and selected you can enter a name and phrase in the Property inspector.
Fig 1: Editing a Dialogue action
Once you've written the paragraph you can create additional Dialogue actions by pressing Alt + Enter.
Fig 2: Dialogue actions in the Action window
Using the Author mode
Dialogue actions are useful when you are writing or editing single paragraphs of text, but when writing long narratives it can become rather clunky to go that route. Therefor there is an alternative mode for writing dialogue. You can access the Author mode by clicking the corresponding tab in the Action window.
Fig 3: The Author mode
In the Author mode you can write freely just like you would in a text editor. As you're typying Dialogue actions will be created and updated automatically. Non-dialogue actions are displayed as gray lines between paragraphs. This is so that you can write around them. A series of non-dialogue actions will get compressed into a single line, but can be expanded by clicking the plus if needed.
As Dialogue in Novelty is paragraph-based so is this text editor, thus all text is separated into paragraphs. To create a new paragraph you can select the empty paragraph at the bottom and just start typing, or you can press Ctrl + Enter at any point in the text to add a new paragraph at that location.
Since each paragraph in the Author mode corresponds to a specific Dialogue action you have option to enter a name as well. To enter a name press Tab.
Author mode keyboard controls
Key | Function |
Enter | New line in paragraph |
Ctrl + Enter | New paragraph / Split paragraph |
Ctrl + Delete | Delete paragraph / Merge paragraphs (below) |
Ctrl + Backspace | Delete paragraph / Merge paragraphs (above) |
Tab | Toggle name editing |
Ctrl + A | Select all (in paragraph) |
Ctrl + C | Copy text / paragraphs |
Ctrl + X | Cut text / paragraphs |
Ctrl + V | Paste text / paragraphs |
Ctrl + Shift + V | Paste paragraphs |
Ctrl + Z | Undo |
Ctrl + Y | Redo |
F11 | Toggle between Action list and Author mode |
Copying and pasting paragraphs
Just like with any text editor you can paste in text from an external source, such as something you've written in Notepad. However, since Novelty needs to treat text as paragraphs there are a few syntactical rules on how the text must be formatted if Novelty should be able to successfully paste the text into multiple paragraphs:
- Paragraphs are separated by one or more empty lines.
- Empty lines within a paragraph must be substituted by a single underscore ("_").
- Names are written within brackets ("[", "]") at the top of a paragraph.
- No other text can follow the name on the same line.
- Optionally, the entire text should start with "#BEGIN#" and end with "#END#".
If not, you must paste with Ctrl + Shift + V to avoid pasting as a single paragraph.
When copying multiple paragraphs in Novelty the text will be automatically formatted like this.
Example:
#BEGIN# [Anna] Hi. This is one paragraph. [Betty] This is another paragraph. This is a paragraph without a name. This paragraph _ has an empty line in it. #END#
Creating non-dialogue actions in Author mode
To keep alternation between modes to a minimum, there are a few actions that you can create from within the Author mode.
You can do this by using a "quick command".
Type the command in an empty paragraph and press Ctrl + Enter to activate it. If the command is valid the corresponding action will be created at that location.
Action | Command syntax | Example |
Enter actor | [Enter Actor name] | [Enter Peter] |
Withdraw actor | [Withdraw Actor name] | [Withdraw Peter] |
Change state (actor) | [Actor name -> State name] | [Peter -> Smiling] |
Change state (object) | [Object name -> State name] | [Heart -> Beating] |
Remarks: All quick commands are case sensitive and are encapsulated by brackets ("[", "]"). If the name of the object, actor or state you've given doesn't exist then the command will fail (ie. the action will not be created).