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...
- Place the characters in the scene (often in multiple pages)
- Hide them
- Make them enter the scene with an action or script
- Display dialogue
- Write dialogue
- Change the character's facial expressions between paragraphs with actions
- Etcetera...
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