Using Novelty > Using actors

Introduction

Consider the following scenario: You have two characters and you want to write a conversation between them.

To do this in the most straight way would mean you'd have to...

The point here is you need to take many small steps to get what you want. To remedy this, you can now explicitly instruct Novelty to treat certain objects as Actors.


Creating an actor

Place an Image or Image set in the set (typically a character) and right click on it and select Create new actor.


Fig 1: Creating an actor

You will be prompted to enter a name, gender and text color. (Note: Setting the gender doesn't serve any purpose yet but may in the future).


Fig 2: Entering the actor's properties

Click OK to finish. Once you've registered the actor you can delete the original object from the scene.

Note: You can review and edit your actors in the Cast manager (Alt+M). From there you can also create 'Empty actors', i.e. actors that aren't associated with any scene object.


Using actors

Once an actor has been registered you can bring it out at any point of your story, in any page.
Just use the Enter actor action. It gives you several options in how the character should appear:


Fig 3: Properties of an Enter actor action

When an actor has been entered into the scene, it acts just like any other object and can thus be modified further with other actions. Additionally, Dialogue actions will recognize actors by name and present additional options to make it easier for you to do common tasks.


Fig 4: A Dialogue actions showing additional options



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