v3.1.1

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👩‍🚒 Getting Help

There are several places you can go to get help with Yarn Spinner.

• Join the Yarn Spinner Discord.
• Talk to us via BlueSky or Mastodon
• To report a bug, file an issue on GitHub.

📦 How To Install Yarn Spinner

To install the most recent release of Yarn Spinner for Unity, please see the Installation Instructions in the Yarn Spinner documentation.

If you want to install this particular version of Yarn Spinner for Unity, follow these steps:

Installing Yarn Spinner for Unity v3.1.1 from Git

• Open the Window menu, and choose Package Manager.
• If you already have any previous version of the Yarn Spinner package installed, remove it.
• Click the + button, and click Add package from git URL...
• Enter the following URL:
  • https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner-Unity.git#v3.1.1

Each release will have a different URL. To upgrade to future versions of Yarn Spinner, you will need to uninstall the package, and reinstall using the new URL.

📜 Changes

Overview

Yarn Spinner for Unity 3.1 contains a number of improvements and useful changes.

Dialogue Runner Is Now More Async

The dialogue runner's StartDialogue and Stop methods are now async, and return a task. When you call StartDialogue, you'll receive a task (either a System.Threading.Tasks task, a UnityEngine.Awaitable, or a UniTask) that will complete after every dialogue presenter has finished running its OnDialogueStartedAsync method. Likewise, the Stop method will finish after every dialogue presenter has finished running its OnDialogueCompleteAsync method. This is really useful for making sure that you don't accidentally make a change to your scene in the middle of your dialogue presenters getting ready.

Dialogue Option Fallthrough

In Yarn Spinner, you can add a condition to the end of an option. If the condition evaluates to false, Yarn Spinner will mark the option as "unavailable". It's up to your game to decide what that means - you might want to make the option visible but unselectable, or you might want to hide the option from the player entirely. However, if every option is unavailable, the player has no option they could select. Previously, this could cause your game to have to soft-lock the player, since they weren't able to proceed.

In Yarn Spinner 3.1, dialogue presenters are now allowed to tell the Dialogue Runner that no option was selected at all. When this happens, Yarn Spinner will skip the options and move on to the next part of the script:

Guard: Who goes there?

// If the player is a thief, a royal visitor, or a merchant, then
// go run the appropriate conversation for that. The player might be
// some combination of the three, so let them choose.
-> A thief! <<if $player_is_thief>>
    <<jump Guard_Thief_Conversation>>
-> A royal visitor! <<if $player_is_royal_visitor>>
    <<jump Guard_RoyalVisitor_Conversation>>
-> A merchant! <<if $player_is_merchant>>
    <<jump Guard_Merchant_Conversation>>

// But if the player is NONE of those, then none of the options would have
// been available. We'll fall through to here.

Player: I'm nobody!
<<jump Guard_Nobody_Conversation>>

Note

You can turn off this behaviour by setting the allowOptionFallthrough property on your DialogueRunner to false.

Lines Know Where They Came From

When Yarn Spinner sends a line to your game, it wraps up the line in an object called a LocalizedLine. Previously, if your game has multiple Dialogue Runners that are running at the same time, it wasn't possible to know which runner the line came from. In Yarn Spinner 3.1, the LocalizedLine now has a Source property that tells you where it came from.

Options Can Now Be Hurried Up And Cancelled

Just like how lines have a separate 'hurry up' and 'next' cancellation tokens that act as a signal to move things along, options now have the same 'hurry up' and 'next' tokens. (Previously, they only had a single cancellation token that signalled that option selection was no longer necessary.) This allows your game to signal that you want to hurry up the presentation of your dialogue's options.

New Typewriter System

We've updated the way that typewriters are used in the built-in Line Presenter system, to make it easier to customise. This is useful for when you want to take full control over how the line appears over time, and for when you want to have in-game events occur (like sound effects) as the line appears.

To create a custom typewriter, create a class that implements IAsyncTypewriter. You can find an example of how to write a custom typewriter in the source code for the LetterTypewriter class.

Note

As part of this change, the On Character Typed event on Line Presenter has been removed. If you want to run code every time a character appears, create a new script that subclasses from ActionMarkupHandler, and add that to an object in your scene. Add that object to the Line Presenter's "Event Handlers" list. In your ActionMarkupHandler subclass, you can write code that gets called every time characters appear on screen by implementing the OnCharacterWillAppear method.

Removed Legacy DialogueView Classes

Yarn Spinner 3.0 introduced a new programming model for presenting dialogue, called Dialogue Presenters. As part of the rollout of this new API, we made the old DialogueView class act as a compatibility layer, and marked it as deprecated. Yarn Spinner 3.1 removes this deprecated code. If you have code that started life as a Yarn Spinner 2.0 project, you will need to migrate your legacy dialogue presentation UI code to use Dialogue Presenters by changing their parent class to DialoguePresenter, and implementing the new methods for presenting lines and options

Added

• DialogueRunner will now log warnings if a dialogue presenter throws an OperationCanceledException - these usually indicate that a task they were themselves waiting on was cancelled, and that the presenter didn't clean up.
• The generated .ysls.json file now contains more complete command and function information.
• Added a new attribute for Yarn Spinner editors: LabelFrom allows specifying a dynamic label for a property by invoking a method.
• Added multiple typewriters and support for them on the LinePresenter:
  • By Word
  • By Letter
  • Instantly
• Added a virtual IAsyncTypewriter field Typewriter onto DialoguePresenterBase
• Added new virtual OnNodeEnter and OnNodeExit calls onto DialoguePresenterBase.
• Added a static FindRunner call onto DialogueRunner, which first tries to find it on the game object itself, followed by anywhere in the scene.
• Added a Source field to the LocalizedLine, this can be of any type but by default will be the DialogueRunner that caused the line to be created
• Options can now be hurried up, the same as lines
  • added RunOptionsAsync(DialogueOption[], LineCancellationToken) to DialoguePresenterBase.
    • this method is virtual and is now the recommended way to respond to options
    • the default implementation just returns nothing selected
  • added NextContentToken to LineCancellationToken which mirrors the existing NextLineToken.
  • added IsNextContentRequested to LineCancellationToken which mirrors the existing IsNextLineRequested bool.
  • added RequestHurryUpOption to DialogueRunner.
  • added hurry up option inputs to LineAdvancer
• LineAdvancer now better handles situations where you want to use the same input for hurrying up and skipping lines.
  • This behaviour is controllable via the separateHurryUpAndAdvanceControls field
• Added a new container type InterfaceContainer, a wrapper class to clean up some interface serialisation pains

Changed

• Fixed a compiler error that occurred when the Unity Input System was enabled, but not actually installed.
• Fixed an error where calls to DialogueRunner.AddFunction() in methods that are in nested classes would cause the function to be registered multiple times, leading to compiler failures.
• Fixed a bug where versions of Unity prior to Unity 2022.3.33 had compilation errors around packages.
• Fixed a bug where some inspector property fields weren't bound preventing configuring Unity localisation or addressables in Unity 2022.3.
• Added more specificity to the Analyser class's use of the C# code generation API.
• AddLineTagsToFilesInYarnProject is now public, allowing for easier use of it in editor scripting.
• Showing character name behaviour in the LinePresenter now correctly matches the documentation.
• DialogueRunner.StartDialogue is now asynchronous and waits for all presenters to finish their OnDialogueStartedAsync calls before exiting
• DialogueRunner.Stop is now asynchronous and waits for all presenters to finish their OnDialogueCompleteAsync calls before exiting
• Fixed a bug where the continue button on the LinePresenter could become non interactive.
• PaletteMarkerProcessor and StyleMarkerProcessor now look less aggressively for their Dialogue Runner.
• LocalizedLine.TextWithoutCharacterName still does not contain the text of the character, but does contain the Markup attribute of the character.
  • This allows other parts of your dialogue UI that might need to know who said a line still use the TextWithoutCharacterName property.
• ReplacementMarkuphandler now returns a ReplacementMarkerResult instead of a list of diagnostics.
  • This is to match the behaviour change in core to fix a markup offset bug
• OptionsPresenter now returns null if there are no options that can be selected due to their availability.
• If there are no available options, Dialogue Runner will now fallthrough to the next piece of content
  • This behaviour can be disabled in the allowOptionFallthrough field on the runner.
• Fixed an issue where Builtin localisation would always use the base localisation when fetching a localised asset (#344)
• The UPM samples installer now installs from a specific tag, rather than the head of the repo.
• Options can now be hurried up, the same as lines. This necessitated several obsolences:
  • RunOptionsAsync(DialogueOption[], CancellationToken) is now obsolete.
  • IsNextLineRequested is now obsolete.
  • NextLineToken is now obsolete.
• RunOptionsAsync(DialogueOption[], CancellationToken) is now virtual.
  • the default implementation selects nothing and instantly returns.
• The Dialogue Presenter template file now has the newer form of RunOptionsAsync.
• Built in presenters now use the newer form of RunOptionsAsync.
• The InputSystemAvailability static class has been made public.
• LineAdvancer will now ignore the signal to 'hurry up' if it comes in the same frame as line was requested to be shown.
  • This fixes a bug where the same key was used to start conversation as well hurry up dialogue.
• Fixed an issue on EnsureInputModuleAvailable where, if there was an input system in the scene but it was of the wrong type, the console would fill up with errors.
• DialogueRunner now waits one frame before starting dialogue when automatically start dialogue is turned on.

Removed

• Removed ActionMarkupHandlers list from DialoguePresenterBase. This was only used by the default line presenter, and is now handled by the typewriter system. This which is more representative of what Action Markup Handling already entailed.
• Removed the legacy Dialogue Views, Typewriter, and Effects.
• Removed the ReplacementMarkupHandler.NoDiagnostics static property, as this no longer matches any need due to core changes around replacement markup.
• Removed RunOptionsAsync(DialogueOption[], CancellationToken) from LinePresenter. This method is now virtual, and the default implementation does what we needed here.