Steve's Unreal Dialogue System (SUDS)

What Is It?

SUDS is a plugin for Unreal Engine 5 which allows you to run dialogues in your game based on a script that you write in a text file.

Scripts look something like this:

Note: this is an image so that you can see the nice syntax highlighting provided by the SUDS VSCode plugin.

SUDS has many features, including:

• Dialogue flow is expressed in a text file for a focussed writing experience
• Multi-line speech support
• Player choices with unlimited embedded responses
• Flow control: goto, gosub, conditional branching, random lines
• Persistent variable state
• Send events back to code/blueprints with any number of arguments
• Supports all the variable substitution and formatting features in the same way Unreal does
• A convenient in-editor testing tool
• Localisation support, including adding translator comments
• Easy integration with save games (SPUD or otherwise)

SUDS was inspired by Ink and YarnSpinner, but I started from scratch and designed it specifically to integrate well with Unreal Engine. It also has a number of differences to those systems, based on my own preferences and the needs of my own project.

Getting Started

• Installation
• Your First SUD Script

SUDS Pro

SUDS is very focussed on providing just a dialogue engine; integrating it with your other game systems is an exercise for the reader; there are multiple ways to do it.

However, if you'd like more of the integration done for you, including supporting making camera cuts, playing cutscenes, and animating characters, I also publish SUDS Pro on Fab. It's pre-built for the engine so you don't need a C++ project, which is also convenient for people who just want to use Blueprints.

You don't need SUDS Pro; core SUDS is a perfectly capable dialogue engine on its own and you can integrate it with the rest of your code how you like. But, if you'd like a little extra functionality pre-integrated, and also to help fund development, please consider buying SUDS Pro.

See Also

• Testing Scripts
• Running Dialogue in Game
• Script reference
• Full Documentation Index
• Frequently Asked Questions