You can add effects to dialogues by using rich text tags.
Example: “I’m cold” can be written as “I’m <shake>cold</shake>“ (in the text component) in order to apply a shaking effect on the specific word “cold”.
P.S. Be sure to have implemented Text Animator in your scene. Read more here.
Effects Categories
Effects are divided in two categories, based on their functionality/application. They consist on:
Behavior Effects
Behavior Effects animate letters continuously during time, after the letter has been shown.
A list of all built-in behavior effects is available here: Built-in Effects list
You can apply behavior effects to your texts by using rich text tags. A Behavior Effect tag looks like this <tag>.
Example: “I’m <wiggle>joking</wiggle>. Now I’m <shake>cold</shake>”.
Modifiers
Modifiers let you change the characteristics of your behavior effects individually.
Example: You could have an effect as twice strong as the previous one, but still in the same dialogue line, like “I was <wiggle>strong</wiggle>… but now I’m<wiggle a=3> three times stronger</wiggle>!!!”
“Modifiers” multiply the relative value; this way you can easily know how much stronger/weaker a modified effect will result compared to the base one (for this reason, a modifier of “1” will return the same result of a base value).
All Modifiers are structured like this: <effectID modifierID=modifierValue> and you can also use multiple of them (eg. <wiggle a=2 f=4>).
You can read a list of all the available modifiers for each effect: Built-in Effects list
Some extra notes:
- ⚠️ Do not write identical attributes in the same tag, since only the last one will take effect.
- ⚠️ Be sure to remove spaces between the modifierID, the ‘=’ symbol and its value
Appearance Effects
Appearance Effects animate letters only when they’re appearing on screen. For this reason, they’re mosty used in combination with the typewriter, which shows letters one after another.
A list of all built-in appearance effects is available here: Built-in Effects list
Set default Appearance Effects to the entire text
You can set which effect(s) will be applied to all letters by default in the TextAnimator component, without having to write appearance tags for each text.
- Head over to the TextAnimator component
- Expand the “Set Default Appearances” section
- Edit the array and add any appearance tag you want to include.
👍🏻 If you don’t want any appearance effect, simply set the effects’ count to zero.
Set Appearance Effects to specific parts of the text
You can also apply Appearance Effects to specific parts of your text by using rich text tags, overriding the default Appearance Effect (if any). An Appearance Effect tag looks like this {tag}.
If you close an appearance tag, the letters will be affected again by the default effect (if any is set).
Example
Let’s say that we have one default effect (“size”), but we want to apply a specific part of the text with the “fade” effect.
We can achieve that result by writing: “default default {fade} fade fade fade {/fade} default default”
As you can see, the letters that are outside the “fade” tags will have the default effect(s) applied, while the part inside “{fade}” and “{/fade}” will only have “fade”.
Extra notes about Rich Text formatting
By using TextAnimator for Unity:
- You can stack multiple effects together (e.g. “
<shake><size>”). - You can close all currently open effects with a single ‘
/’ character, like “</>” for Behavior Effects or “{/}” for Appearance Effects. - 👍🏻 There is no need to close tags if you’re at the end of the text.
More than default effects, you can also create your own.
- Create Effects from the Inspector: Creating Effects in the Inspector
- Write Custom Effects (C#): Writing Custom Effects (C#)
How to tweak effects values
Built-in effects
You can tweak built-in effects’ values in the TextAnimator component.
- Expand the category of the effect you want to edit. (Behavior effects or Appearance effects)
- Expand the effect you want to edit.
Shared built-in values
You can also use the same built-in effect values for multiple TextAnimator components.
- In your project folder, create the scriptable object asset of your effect category (Behaviors/Appearances).
- Assign the scriptable object to the Text Animator component you want to share the values with.
👍🏻 Any TextAnimator that contains the same built-in scriptable object reference will share its same effect values.
Dynamic Scaling
You can setup uniform effects’ behavior on different screen resolutions.
Reference Font Size: represents the size where objects behave as expected. As a reference, you can pick the font size in your unity editor.
Example
For example, open the "Example 1A - Effects" scene, so you'll automatically have all the default effects showed in the text.
- Set the TMPro text's size to any number, like 30. (remove "auto size", if present)
- Set the "Reference font size" to that same number.
→ The behavior of your effects in your screen resolution will now be uniform in other screen resolutions.
You can safely tweak the effects values as you prefer, and thanks to this configuration and TextAnimator will maintain the desired and original effect intensities in case the font size changes (do not change the "Reference Font Size", or the scaling will be different).
Intensity Multiplier
⚠️ Some effects act differently based on different fonts and sizes. You can read which effect is affected here: Built-in Effects list
👍🏻 In order to “fix” this, you can use the variable effectIntensityMultiplier to scale all the affected effect’s amplitudes in the TextAnimator component.
Simple explanation: an effect’s strength of 2 could result weak in UI units (pixels), but really strong in world units. Then there is the font asset size etc.
This value will multiply only the affected variables, leaving unchanged the ones that are independent from different fonts and sizes.
Time Scale Mode
You can change the effects TimeScale mode in the “TextAnimator” component.
- Scaled: effects will slow down / pause based on the game Time.timeScale
- Unscaled: effects will update even if the game is paused (Time.timeScale = 0)
If you have the typewriter enabled, its timescale will match the relative TextAnimator’s timescale (which means that you can also show letters when the game is paused by setting the timescale to “unscaled”).
⚠️ If the game timescale is negative TextAnimator will act like it’s paused, but it will automatically resume once it’s “more than zero”.