Dialogue & Quests Course: making the Dialog Text

[Maria1]

I’m following the Dialogue RPG course and I was wondering how I could make it that the textfield of the dialogue node gradually grows depending on how much text there is.
I tried to make it with a scrollbar, but it ended up affecting all scrollbars of each node in the selected Dialogue SO. Any help/ideas would be really appreciated

[Marc_Carlyon]

@Brian_Trotter

[Brian_Trotter]

Scrollbars are next to impossible to get to work, and no matter what, they really won’t work inside of a Text Area (I’ve tried and tried with no success, there).

I do have a slight workaround that will make the field (and the node) grow automatically without a scrollbar, though it’s slightly tempermental…

First, we need to add a method in DialogueNode.cs to set the size of the Rect, as we’ll be growing/shrinking the rect based on the contents of the text.

        public void SetRectHeight(float newHeight)
        {
            rect.height = newHeight;
        }

Now for the tricky stuff… There’s not a tried and true way to tell exactly how many lines a TextArea should take, but we can make some guestimates. Head into the DrawNode() method in the DialogueEditor.cs script

        private void DrawNode(DialogueNode node)
        {
            GUIStyle style = nodeStyle;
            if (node.IsPlayerSpeaking())
            {
                style = playerNodeStyle;
            }
            string textFieldContent = node.GetText();
            int charsPerLine = 20; //Adjust this to taste
            int lines = (textFieldContent.Length / charsPerLine) + 1; //Guesses the number of lines
            float fixedHeight = lines * GUI.skin.font.lineHeight * 1.2f; //Calculate box height
            node.SetRectHeight(60+fixedHeight); //Adjust the node to support new box height
            GUILayout.BeginArea(node.GetRect(), style);
            
            //Create a style for the Text Area with the proper dimensions
            var textAreaStyle = new GUIStyle(EditorStyles.textArea);
            textAreaStyle.wordWrap = true;
            textAreaStyle.fixedHeight = lines * GUI.skin.font.lineHeight * 1.2f;
            textAreaStyle.fixedWidth = 150;

            node.SetText(EditorGUILayout.TextArea(node.GetText(), textAreaStyle));
            
            GUILayout.BeginHorizontal();
            //remainder of the method