Speaker lines are the primary building block of a SUDS script. They represent a single line of dialogue, associated with a speaker.
Beatrice: Against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.You can also create multi-line speaker lines by using continuation lines:
Beatrice: I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me.
If it had been painful, I would not have come.This is still a single "line" of dialogue, issued all at once, but contains an embedded carriage return. A new speaker line is not started unless the speaker prefix occurs again. Because leading and trailing whitespace are removed, you can align this continuation however you like.
The format is more formally:
SpeakerID: Line
OptionalContinuation*| SpeakerID | Identifier for the speaker; also its display name unless otherwise defined. Cannot contain whitespace. |
| Line | The line of dialogue text. Any characters allowed, can include variables and rich text formatting. |
| OptionalContinuation | One or more continuation lines which append their contents to the previous speaker line, with the carriage return preserved (but leading/trailing whitespace removed) |
Speakers are identified by the prefix at the start of a speaker line, with a colon
(:) separating it from the text of the line. Speakers IDs cannot contain whitespace.
By default, the speaker ID is also used as the display name to the player
(calling GetSpeakerID and GetSpeakerDisplayName on the runtime dialogue returns
the same thing).
Alternatively you can define a display name for a speaker separately.
There are several reasons why you might want a separate display name for a speaker instead of using the Speaker ID directly:
- Whitespace: Speaker ID's cannot have whitespace in them, so if you want your character's name to include a space, it needs a separate display name
- Brevity: Maybe you just want to type a shorter name most of the time
- Localisation: You might want to give your characters language-specific names.
Speaker display names are implemented using the variable system.
If you set a variable called SpeakerName.SpeakerID (replacing SpeakerID with
the matching speaker identifier) to a text value, that will be used as the display name
for that speaker from then on.
[set SpeakerName.Percy "Lord Percy Percy, Heir to the Duchy of Northumberland"]You might want to set speaker display names in the header of your script, ensuring they're always set regardless of where you start the dialogue. Alternatively, because Set lines can be placed anywhere, you can change the display name of your speakers between lines if you want, for example to have a reveal of a character's name later in the dialogue.
Because text values in Set lines are automatically tagged for localisation, you can set the name in the primary language here and localise it later.
In the text sections of a speaker line, you can substitute the values of variables, and add rich text formatting markup.
As a quick guide, add variables using curly braces ({}), and rich text formatting
using angle brackets (<>), something like this:
Urchin: Yeah I saw the <red>thief</> mister, he ran down {DiversionaryStreetName}!For more information, see Text Markup.