Renpy To Light.vn Tutorial 【Basic #002】 - Showing dialogues

Hello! Today I will continue to talk about a visual novel engine 【light.vn】

And today's topic is showing dialogues in light.vn!

Show dialogue in Light.vn

Unlike Ren'Py where you can directly display text, Light.vn requires defining a textbox first.

If you want to have something like this:

As mentioned earlier, sample projects in Light.vn have pre-defined textboxes. You can conveniently use these existing boxes without needing to create new ones.

And the file can be find here:

If you did not change the path or add other folder, then it should be in:

• Data > Scripts > ststem

If you're unsure which text boxes are available to use in your sample project, you can check the script file named "textbox.txt" and you will also notice that quick_menu is also defined in textbox.

How to customize / create a new textbox?

Since we talk about textbox and we are already in 「textbox.txt」, let's create a new textbox in Light.vn!

What I'd do is to copy the code from the default textbox and change the code as you wish lately.

You can customize, for example:

• font
• text color
• font size
• textbox background image
• text position
• etc.

One Example of a custom textbox:

clear
bookmark selfmade_textbox
script system/textbox.txt cache

textbox0 txtbox_sm 292 573 100 824 150 PlaywriteAT-Regular.ttf 22 on_camera
useTextbox txtbox_sm
textBold false
textShadow 0 
textLineSize 25
textWordWrap false
textboxSkin textbox_purple.png -550 -200
textDir horizontal
textColour #000000
textFlowEffect 8


textReadAlpha 125 100


animationEx sys_wait_icon 1 sys2/Cursor_%02d.png 1 24 1 24 1 30
textWaitIcon 0 sys_wait_icon 10 7

zoom txtbox_sm 80% 80%
.fadein txtbox_sm 999

script_fin

In this example, I did not change too many thing, what I changed from the default textbox are:

• font: rounded-mplus-1c-regular.ttf ➡️ PlaywriteAT-Regular.ttf
• textbox background: default background image ➡️custom one (textbox_purple.png)
• position of the textbox: -273 -42 ➡️ -550 -200
• size of the textbox: my textbox was too big and I resized it used the command zoom 80% 80%

So now we have defined a new textbox in light.vn!

Now let's preview it and let's see how does it look like if we use multiple textboxes in a game!

For more information, you can check their official documentation here!

How to show dialogue in Light.vn?

Now we come to the main topic!

Add a new dialogue / text page

In light.vn, if you want the text or your dialogue to start from a new text page then you can use this command 「"」 pr 「-"」. In normal case we only need 「"」 - it will let you start a new text page.

「-"」 will let you continue write from last line, which is not really common use.

Start a New Line in a dialogue (text page)

To add text in the second line, you might know / remember we have this in Ren'py 「\n」and in here we only need to write 「.」 in a new line to do so.

End Dialogue

Once your dialogue or conversation ends and you want to add actions like moving character sprites or changing the background image, etc. , you'll need to use the 「~」 symbol

Everything between the 「~」 and the next 「"」 symbol is considered part of the action sequence. This is where you can place your desired action commands.

Final: Ren'py Command ➡️ Light.vn Command

To make everything clear, I've made a list / table here to compare between each command from renpy to Light.VN:

So here's the second episode of this series, next post I'll talk about audio in detail. So if you're interested in this visual novel engine, don't forget to follow our site!

Check last episode:

• Renpy To Light.vn Tutorial 【Basic #001】