Unity

Moontale provides a standard integration with the Unity engine (Moontale for Unity - 'MFU'), which lets you play back your stories on a UI canvas or using TextMeshPro. It handles basic formatting, hover and click events, images, and audio, while being fairly easy to extend for your specific application.

MFU leverages MoonSharp (no affiliation!) as a cross-platform Lua runtime. This allows Moontale to (in principle) support all the build targets that Unity offers.

Installing

npm install -g openupm-cli
cd my/unity/project
openupm add moonsharp com.hmilne.moontale@https://github.com/hamish-milne/moontale.git?path=/moontale-unity/Packages/com.hmilne.moontale

Components

MFU operates as a 'pipeline', with the Story component as the top-level 'source', and text output components as the 'sinks', with other components acting as transformers, multiplexers and so on.

If this sounds a little complicated, don't worry - for simple use cases, all you need is a Story to load your Lua script, and an Output to put text on the screen. When you come to add your own functionality, you can implement it as a pipeline component without having to touch any other code.

Source

The Moontale Story component is what runs your story's code, listens for the emission functions and passes them to a Sink (which draws text on the screen). It loads the standard library, followed by the scripts you specify in the component.

You can add your story script in two ways: you can simply drop the Lua file somewhere in your Assets folder, which will import it as a TextAsset that you can add to the Story component. Alternatively you can put it into StreamingAssets and type in the path to load, which is a little less compatible (notably, WebGL builds don't support this at the moment) but makes modding a lot easier.

Sinks

MFU has two output components built-in:

The TextMeshPro Sink links to any TextMeshPro instance. It supports a wide array of formatting tags and allows use of TextMeshPro's full feature set, which is quite large.

The UI Text Sink links to a standard UI text component. It supports a limited set of formatting tags; notably, there is no ability to switch fonts mid-text, nor the ability to draw images inline. The visual output is a little higher quality, and more flexible with changing size, on account of using true dynamic font rendering rather than a pre-baked texture.