GUI Introduction
The first thing you’ll want to do is familiarize yourself with the interface itself. Nothing about it is particularly unusual, and most of it should be self-explanatory.
Main Interface
The main interface is divided into three parts, as shown in the image above.
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First is the Conversation Simulator, marked as section 1. This area, based on FEITS by SciresM, simulates the display of text within the games themselves. Unlike FEITS, the simulator will also play BGM and sound effects if that content pack has been installed and audio is not disabled.
This area also includes a pair of buttons that allow you to toggle the current development tab between game text and script modes.
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Second is the Development Area, marked as section 2. This is a series of tabs corresponding to the text keys in the currently opened conversation file. If a conversation is currently in script mode, it will have syntax highlighting to help guide you as you write.
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Finally we have section 3, the Audio Palette. If you have the audio pack for a game installed, you will be able to sample the audio files for every character in the game in order to help you decide what to insert into a conversation. The last file that you sample will even be copied to your clipboard in the format appropriate for the current development tab!
Conversation Simulator
The Conversation Simulator is, as noted above, a Java conversion of FEITS with a few tweaks.
At the top is the actual display panel on which the Editor will draw the conversation. If you right-click on it, a context menu will appear that will give you options to save either the current image or the entire conversation. Please note that, as of this time, the display panel will not render type 0 conversations quite as they should be in Awakening mode. While Awakening positions messages against the edges of the screen, they are still centered in the simulator. This will be corrected in a future release.
If background display has been turned on, you can drag an image file onto the simulator to cause it to be used as the conversation’s background.
Beneath the display panel is the control panel, which consists of five buttons across two rows.
The first row of buttons is used to control the conversation display. “Reload Text” will load the current conversation tab’s contents into the simulator and allow you to view the conversation from the top. The “Previous” and “Next” buttons allow you to move through the conversation. You can think of the “Next” button as analogous to pressing A in the game, while the “Previous” button has no real equivalent.
The second row of buttons is actually related to the Development Area, but was grouped with the Conversation Simulator for aesthetic reasons. The “Convert to Game” button will cause the active development tab to convert its text from a script to game-formatted text, while the “Convert to Script” button will do the opposite. Note that you do not need to use the “Convert to Game” button before saving text formatted as a script. Conversion will be performed automatically if you save to any format aside from .fescript.
Development Area
You will be spending the bulk of your time in the Development Area. This consists of a tab pane that contains tabs corresponding to every key in the open text file.
At the top of the area are the tabs themselves. Clicking on a tab will give it the focus, and right-clicking will allow you to rename the tab, delete the tab, or add a new tab (and thus a new key to the text file). Key names must be unique, so the Editor will prevent you from renaming a tab to an existing key name or creating a new tab with the same name as an existing tab. If the current text file has more tabs than will fit in the visible area, you will be able to scroll them with the mouse wheel or access a full pop-up list of tabs via a button on the right-hand side of the pane.
Below the tab list you will find the editor pane for the current tab. The editor pane contains all of the text contained in the message key of the tab, and if the text is in a script format it will have syntax highlighting.
Blue text shows keywords while green text shows valid parameters for command arguments. Valid character names will be in purple. Invalid parameters and character names will be displayed in red, like the ‘Angy’ in the screenshot above.
Audio Palette
The Audio Palette provides a convenient way to select sound effects for your conversations. By clicking on a button its associated sound effect will be played and a version of it appropriate for use in the text type of the current tab (either script or game text) will be copied into your clipboard. Sound effects are divided up by their owners, allowing you to easily find what you are looking for.