Auto text progression/Force Skip/Skip Read Text

[SnowyBot]

Are these three features present anywhere? I read that Dialogic was oriented around Visual Novels so I figured those three things would be staple features but I haven't been able to find any of the standard buttons other than the "History" function.

To clarify, Auto is referring to a toggleable button that allows the game to automatically progress through the timeline on its own, after waiting out a user-defined delay once an event is finished.

Skip Read Text (and Force Skip) is in reference to the button that allows a player to forcefully skip through the timeline as fast as possible, or have it automatically skip all previously-read text until reaching a point in the timeline that hasn't been read before.

For the life of me I've been trying to find documentation on these features, but I haven't seen any nor have I really seen anyone talking about it (which furthered the idea that I'm just missing something obvious)? This plugin is absolutely fantastic but unless there's a way to integrate these features (whether it's through dialogic or through some finagling outside of the dialogic system), it would be a total dealbreaker for me.

I'm a fairly new programmer so if I'm just being an idiot about this please set me straight, but if you know a way to integrate these features I'd be forever appreciative for the help.

[Yotopihi-Dev]

Not sure if I'm getting your question right, but if you mean skipping a whole timeline with something like an input, go to the dialogic canvas script and type this:
func _process(delta):
if Input.is_action_just_pressed("Dialog_skip"):
dialog_finished()
_on_timeline_end(delta)
and if you want an option for the whole text to be over with an input, dialogic already lets you do that with ui accept I believe

and if you want to make the story go ahead without needing to press an input, connect event end to start the next event

[SnowyBot]

Hmm, that's not quite how I mean. Pretty much every Visual Novel uses (and kinda needs) these features. Auto is meant to be up to preference. The player choses on a whim when they want it to autoplay and when they want to use manual-press, and in the options there's a setting to customize how long it waits before automatically moving forward to the next event in the timeline (so you can use it with any reading speed). For many people that's the only way they like to read, and for many it's the opposite.

Skipping is meant to just run through the timeline but really REALLY quickly. This is used for when people want to, well, skip ahead for any reason (reloading an old save, trying to find a specific part, getting back to branching points, etc. etc.), and there's typically a feature that automatically runs through any text that has already been read by the player, so you can afk while it skips what you've read and it'll stop when you reach new dialog/routes that you'd unlocked.

[zaknafean]

Dialogic, while feature full, is not as feature complete as a mature product like Ren'py. In addition despite the focus on visual novels alot of dev focus (mine specifically) is not focus specifically on visual novel specific features.

That is to say we don't have those features at this time, and adding them would be non trivial. History itself was only added in version 1.3! The intention is to have them, but there is no current Eta as focus is on the Dialogic 2.0 rewrite (as Dialogic is going to break in Godot 4.0, so needs some reworks).

[SnowyBot]

That's understandable. I think I took for granted how new this all is. Fantastic work so far -- the quality of the work so far is actually what left me surprised haha, it was so good I found myself thinking "wow, how aren't these things already here?" Looking forward to see what comes in the future!