Dialogue Options and Variable Speeds of Text - Newbie

Hello,

So I am new to Clickteam Fusion 2.5. It seems simple enough for the most part but some specific things are giving me trouble. I'm trying to develop a game where everything revolves around the dialogue. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be many tutorials or documents available for anything regarding text or dialogue. If anyone has any answers or tutorials or objects that can be installed it would be very helpful. Or even if anyone is willing to chat over discord or something sometime. One of the problems is I have a lot of questions, but have no idea where to go to have them answered. What I really need is a mentor, haha.


Things I'm trying to accomplish:

1. Changing the timer mid-string (This is the biggest thing I'm trying to figure out currently)
- So I would like to have control over how long each section of the string displays for. For example, text types out for 5 milliseconds for 20 characters, then switches to 15 milliseconds, then pause for 1 second. There has to be a way to do it, but I don't know if it's something you can type into the paragraph itself to set the speeds of the timer. There's no voice-acting so all of the characters' personality would be from this timing.

2. Setting flags in the text so it doesn't repeat
- I have it so when you click on a character the dialogue starts, but I'm not sure how to set it to where if you talk to the character again it doesn't repeat the same dialogue. I'm sure there's something that I can do that sets a flag when the last paragraph has finished displaying but I'm not sure how that works.

3. How to deactivate active objects so the player can't click on them during dialogue being displayed
- I have characters on the screen that will activate the dialogue when you click on them. But after the initial text starts displaying I just want mouse clicks anywhere to advance the dialogue unless there are dialogue options to choose from.

There are other things I'm trying to do, but I feel like these are the most important baseline things that the game is based around. I've looked over the forum, but couldn't find anything recent, helpful, or in-depth as I need. Any help at all would be appreciated. Especially pointing me in a direction of someone I could talk to over a period of time if they were ok with that. Sorry for being such a newbie, but I'll get there eventually.


Thanks,
The Big Palooka

For point 2 the thing I'd do is giving the character a value that stays at 0 before you talk to it, and after you talk to it it sets to 1 and never goes back to 0. Something like this:

"if mouse clicks character and its value is =0, display full dialogue"
"if full dialogue has ended set character's value to 1"

"if mouse clicks character and its value is =1, display dialogue 2"


For point 3 I'd suggest a value too, it might be global or in an object in the frame (it could be the mouse).

You can only click objects and interact with them if this value is at 0, and if an interaction has just started set value to 1, and when the interaction ends the value should revert back to 0.


I have no idea on how to do point 1, and it's something I'd like to know how to do too.


Even though I've been working with this program for almost 2 years I'm kind of a newbie too, and I'm absolutely sure there are better ways to do this that what I've suggested, but hopefully what I've said here works for you.

Thanks for the suggestions On using values. I'll start messing with that as an option.

I don't know if there's a way when you set the alterable string for the text to do an order of operations so you can tell it to type a certain number of character, then change the timer speed, then continue typing. I'm not sure how to reference the timer from the code though. Or if you even can. I'm not good with traditional coding as much as visual coding, hence me using Clickteam Fusion.

It seems I can reference the milliseconds in the alterable string by clicking the timer. Just not sure how I would insert that into the code to change the timer value mid-string. I wonder if it would be easier to type the dialogue into the alterable string rather than calling to the paragraph so I can have more control. But again I'm not sure how to do that yet.