Translations by Stephan Woidowski

A String that enables the voice file assosiated with the Character to be muted or played in the 'voice' channel.

The final form consists of a string and a with clause which has a transition. In this case, the string is shown and a screen is shaked at the same time.

Dialogue and Narration

Text is fundamental to visual novels, and generally quite important to storytelling-based games. This text may consist of dialogue labeled with the character that is saying it, and narration, which does not have a speaker. (For convenience, we will lump both dialogue and narration together as dialogue, except where the differences are important.) It's also important that the user be able to customize the look of dialogue to suit their game.

In Ren'Py, most dialogue is written using say statements. The look of dialogue may be customized on a per-character basis by using Character objects.

Say Statement

The say statement is used for dialogue and narration. Since it's almost always the most frequently used statement in Ren'Py scripts, the say statement has a syntax that minimizes the overhead in writing it. Some example say statements are::

The first form of the say statement consists of a string by itself. This form is used for narration, with the narration being the contents of the string.

The second form consists of two strings. The first string is the name of the character who is speaking, and the second is the dialogue being spoken.

The third form consists of a simple expression followed by a string. The simple expression should evaluate to either a string giving a character name, or a Character object. In the latter case, the character object is used to control how the dialogue is shown.

The final form consists of a string and a with clause which has a transition. In this case, the string is shown and a screen is shaken at the same time.

Although the precise details of what a say statement does is controlled by the character object used, the usual effect of a say statement is to display dialogue on the screen until the user clicks to dismiss it, then to remove that dialogue on the screen.

Certain characters have special meaning to Ren'Py, and so can't be used in dialogue strings. The ``{`` character begins a text tag, and the ``[`` character begins a substitution. To use them in dialogue, double them. It may also be necessary to precede a quote with a backslash to prevent it from closing the string. For example::

Defining Character Objects

By creating a Character object and using it in a say statement, you can customize the look (and to some extent, the behavior) of dialogue. Characters are created by using the define statement to assign a Character to a variable. For example::

Once this is done, the character can be used in a say statement::

Character is a python function, that takes a large number of keyword arguments. These keyword arguments control the behavior of the character.

The define statement causes its expression to be evaluated, and assigned to the supplied name. If not inside an init block, the define statement will automatically be run with init priority 0.

Creates and returns a Character object, which controls the look and feel of dialogue and narration.

`name`

If a string, the name of the character for dialogue. When `name` is ``None``, display of the name is omitted, as for narration.

`kind`

The Character to base this Character off of. When used, the default value of any argument not supplied to this Character is the value of that argument supplied to `kind`. This can be used to define a template character, and then copy that character with changes.

**Linked Image** An image tag may be associated with a Character. This allows a say statement involving this character to display an image with the tag, and also allows Ren'Py to automatically select a side image to show when this character speaks.

`image`

A string giving the image tag that is linked with this character.

**Voice Tag** If a voice tag is assign to a Character, the voice files that are associated with it, can be muted or played in the preference screen.

`voice_tag`

A String that enables the voice file associated with the Character to be muted or played in the 'voice' channel.

**Prefixes and Suffixes.** These allow a prefix and suffix to be applied to the name of the character, and to the text being shown. This can be used, for example, to add quotes before and after each line of dialogue.

`what_prefix`

A string that is prepended to the dialogue being spoken before it is shown.

`what_suffix`

A string that is appended to the dialogue being spoken before it is shown.

`who_prefix`

A string that is prepended to the name of the character before it is shown.

`who_suffix`

A string that is appended to the name of the character before it is shown.

**Changing Name Display.** These options help to control the display of the name.

`dynamic`

If true, then `name` should be a string containing a python expression. That string will be evaluated before each line of dialogue, and the result used as the name of the character.

**Controlling Interactions.** These options control if the dialogue is displayed, if an interaction occurs, and the mode that is entered upon display.

`condition`

If given, this should be a string containing a python expression. If the expression is false, the dialogue does not occur, as if the say statement did not happen.

`interact`

If true, the default, an interaction occurs whenever the dialogue is shown. If false, an interaction will not occur, and additional elements can be added to the screen.

`mode`

A string giving the mode to enter when this character speaks. See the section on :ref:`modes <modes>` for more details.

`callback`

A function that is called when events occur while the character is speaking. See the section on :ref:`character-callbacks` fore more information.