I am nearing the end of a game production, and are struggling with a styling issue in the borderlands between Godot and the addon Dialogue manager by Nathan Hoad. A straightforward addon that supports this dialogue-driven game nicely.
The problem is that I want two distinctly different styles of speech frames: I use a cartoon-like speech bubble for almost all the characters, slowly animated, it works perfectly. But for one scene, I want the dialogue to appear in a web forum, more like a list on a screen, far from the organic speech bubble style. And I can’t make it happen. So I wonder if anyone can point on on the way:
Do I need to install a second version of Dialogue manager to separate those styes? And be certain to avoid the versions to crash into eachother. Or can I create a separate style inside the current installation of the addon, and just point to that when the specific scene starts? In that case, how on earth would the code look for that? I am just messing things up at the moment.
You shouldn’t need a second install. Dialogue Manager can use more than one balloon scene, show_dialogue_balloon_scene takes the balloon path as its first argument:
So your speech bubble stays the one set in Project Settings and keeps getting used by plain show_dialogue_balloon, and only the forum scene calls show_dialogue_balloon_scene pointing at the other one.
For building the second balloon there’s a “Create copy of example dialogue balloon…” item under Project > Tools. Save the copy into its own folder and restyle it into the list look, it’s a normal scene so you can rearrange the layout however you like.
There’s also the option of adding a balloon to your scene as a node and calling start() on it instead of showing it from code, which might suit the forum scene since it sounds like it’s the whole screen rather than a popup over a character.