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Since the regular Text Displayer gadget is already a very versatile tool (even more so now that we’ve recently got sticker mode!), I would like for the Dialogue Text Displayer to receive some love, too. It already is a useful gadget if you’re looking to implement something exactly the way the gadget was meant for: branching dialogue by providing a selection of different options. Note that this is also the only text gadget with built-in imp interaction (i.e. click on an option with your imp to select it, instead of pressing a button on the controller), which, at least for me, is the main reason to use this gadget to build UI.
However, if you’re looking to have a little more control over how this gadget behaves, you’re out of luck. Here are I few points that I could think of that would allow the Dialogue Text Displayer to be used for more use cases while avoiding overhead logic by providing a few more built-in features:
- No hide/disable of the gadget on choice selection:
This would allow the text and prompts to stay on screen even after they’ve been selected. This allows for permanent options to just stay on screen or use the gadget entirely as “button gadget”.
- Skip and Close outputs (pulse):
This would allow us to fire events after a dialogue has been skipped or closed. This could be used to trigger humorous dialogues for characters to complain why you skip their dialogue or to handle closing of other menus or UI elements by exiting the dialogue. You could potentially use a prompt to provide an output for closing, but since we have a built-in option to select a close button, an output for when that button is pressed seems only natural.
- Independent styling options for dialogue choices:
While this would probably prove more difficult to implement, let alone because of the multitude of styling options, there could at least just a few selectors, e.g. to hide borders or background fills for prompts while keeping them for the dialogue text.
- Resizing of prompts:
Going along with styling options, being able to resize prompts individually (instead of only having them resize automatically by text length) would be useful. Firstly to be able to create consistent sizing of boxes (if borders are enabled) and second to provide an arbitrarily sized imp-clickable area independent of text length.