Hello and welcome to the articy:draft X Basics tutorial series. In this lesson we will look at synchronized panes and the Property Inspector.
Synchronized view panes
Sometimes it is helpful to have more than one view on the same object at the same time. You might want to have your eyes on both the general and the template tab of an entity.
You can open the entity in a second view pane, by hovering over the side until the two orange arrows appear, then left click, hold, and drag to the desired position.
If I select the Template tab now, I can monitor both tabs at the same time.
But this stops being convenient when I want to switch to a different entity, as I have to manually make the selection for the second view pane as well.
The synchronized pane feature allows you to make one pane “listen” to the selection of another pane and, in the case the selection changes, automatically change its own selection accordingly. This way, you can go through your characters, for example, by clicking one after the other and automatically seeing the other property tab of the selected element in the synchronized pane.
To turn a regular view pane into a synchronized pane, click the small broadcast icon in the pane’s upper-right-hand corner.
The broadcast icon will turn orange and change into a receiving icon, signifying the change from broadcasting to receiving.
To change the pane back to normal, simply click the icon again and it will return to broadcasting form.
The Property Inspector
The property inspector is a very useful shortcut on the jumpstart page. A double-click activates the sync-mode of that pane and switches to the property sheet view.
I have a template on these Dialogue Fragments that allow me to select a camera angle, a property that will be accessed in the game engine to control camera movement during a conversation.
Manually opening the property sheet view for each and every dialogue fragment, setting the desired angle in the template property, and then going back to the Flow is pretty tedious.
Not so much with the Property Inspector. Create a second view pane. Then open the Property Inspector from the Jumpstart page by double clicking the icon. This pane is now synced and listens to changes in other view panes, in addition it automatically opens in the property sheet view.
All we need to do is select the Template tab.
Now we can go through the dialogue on the left side, keeping the overview of the context of the conversation, and are able to quickly adjust the camera angle for the selected node.
Another use case for the property inspector is monitoring variable changes while playing through the story in the Presentation view. Check out the presentation view lesson for more details about this helpful tool.
You can also switch from property sheet view to Localization view, if you want to follow the dialogue node by node and at the same time monitor the localization to a specific secondary language, opposed to displaying the entire dialogue in the localization view at once. More about Localization in the introductory lesson in this series or the extensive separate tutorials.
The property inspector even works if you have more than two panes open. In that case it always shows the selected object of the active pane.
GO TO “PRESENTATION VIEW” LESSON
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