Await until a tween is finished before starting the dialogue

[juliohq]

I'm trying to animate a dialogue layer with a Tween (the width of a PanelContainer so that I can add an open/close effect when the speaker changes) but the timeline starts at the same time as the Tween starts. Is there any way to make Dialogic await until my animation is finished before starting? Is it related to this PR or could it be helpful somehow when merged?

I'm using Godot v4.2.2-stable and the latest commit of Dialogic.

[CakeVR]

That's my PR, it adds a new Timeline Event that allows to construct a Tween. Feel free to give it a try.

You can create a method on an Autoload and await inside it. Once you use the Call Timeline Event, Dialogic will pause the timeline until the method returns.

[juliohq]

That looks really interesting and Dialogic indeed would benefit from having such events. I'm looking forward to it!

[Jowan-Spooner]

You can insert animations for showing and hiding the textbox (see the default textbox layers animation script). However it might be good to add an additional dialog_begin and dialog_end animation.

For now you probably can just set Dialogic.paused to true in _ready of one of your layers and then animate before setting Dialogic.paused to false again.

[Jowan-Spooner]

Do you mean at the end of the timeline?

[juliohq]

Yes, after the timeline ends Dialogic should emit the animation_textbox_hide signal, which for some weird reason doesn't actually calls my _textbox_hide function connected to that signal (maybe it isn't connected in time?), which then plays the hide animation.

[Jowan-Spooner]

Hey @juliohq sorry again for the delay 🙈. I think it's most likely that this is just the timeline being deleted to quickly. To fix this you can just add a [wait time="1"] one second wait event, which will hide the textbox and delay the actual deletion of the style a bit.

[juliohq]

Is there any other way to make Dialogic wait without having to add wait events to each timeline? The Visual Novel style, for example, doesn't need wait events for it to work properly.

[Jowan-Spooner]

That's not true I think, the visual novel layout is also just deleted on timeline end and thus has no textbox hide animation if there is no time left.
I cannot think of another way to do this right now (besides modifying the plugin code, e.g. inserting something in the end_timeline() method). It's something I will think about, because I think it's a common need, but it's not there yet.