Finally... another alpha! 🥂

It's been way to long, but here it is. And this one has it all: features, fixes and breaking changes 🙈.
Some of the highlights are:

• Play from here: Right click (or CTRL+F6) to test the timeline starting right where you are!
• Character Prefixes and Suffixes: Make your characters texts unique. Now twice as easily!
• Fade out timelines: Timelines will now finally gracefully exit without having to add a clear event.
• Timeline Shortcut CheatSheet: Read about all your favourite shortcuts in this handy new overview.
• Replace: You can now easily replace in timelines with CTRL+R!
• Music and Sound become Audio: A single event to rule all your audio layers. Much more flexible!
• Runtime resources: Characters and timelines now behave better when created at runtime. One neat side-feature is that you can now have one-off characters (without portraits). E.g. Stranger (blue): I'm a one-off character and my name label is blue...
• Improve Portrait Animation Naming: ⚠️ This one is a breaking change. You will have to replace Slide In/Out Left/Right with their new names Slide From/To Left/Right.
• Cool Text-Fade-Effects allow you to let the text fade in... in a cool way!
• Godot 4.4+: And finally, this release makes dialogic work much better with 4.4.x. But that also means that ⚠️ this release drops compatibility with 4.2.

There is dozens of more useful fixes, changes and additions. But it also took so long, because I've been quite busy outside of Dialogic. If you want to encourage me to spent more time on it, share the cool work you are using it for on our discord or join my patreon!

Breaking changes

• Support for godot 4.2 has been dropped.
• The Slide in animations have been renamed. If you didn't know, you can use the Broken Reference Manager to quickly replace texts in all of your timelines:
  
• The speaker in the current_state_info is now stored by it's identifier, not it's resource path. This might break older save files and custom script logic.
• The new unified audio event has a different syntax. All your old audio and sound events can easily be updated by clicking the Resave all Timelines button in the settings:
  

What's Changed

• Set Extra Data after updating portrait in Character Update Event by @salianifo in #2472
• chore: fix small spelling mistake in event documentation. by @rberends in #2470
• Sort subsystems for cleaner diffs by @salianifo in #2467
• Fix file field clobbering path on unfocus without changes by @salianifo in #2473
• Make visual timeline deselect other items when selecting an already selected one by @salianifo in #2462
• Add Character Prefixes and Suffixes to Text Events by @CakeVR in #2460
• Fix visual editor event copy/paste issues by @salianifo in #2459
• Fix base layers when creating styles by @Jowan-Spooner in #2474
• Fix wrong typing on sorting subsystems loop by @salianifo in #2476
• fix: portrait overlapping #2458 by @ssw940521 in #2464
• Fix instancing new Character Nodes on Simple Highlight Portrait by @CakeVR in #2486
• Styles: Fix persistent info getting lost by @Jowan-Spooner in #2479
• Ignore directories ignored by godot (.gdignore file) by @jrb0001 in #2501
• Feat: background file can now be loaded from user:// scope too by @orangemelon69 in #2503
• Improve random selection regex and highlighting by @Jowan-Spooner in #2478
• Fix crash when creating DialogicLabelEvent in gdscript by @shazzner in #2480
• Add Choices to last_question_info. by @CakeVR in #2485
• Check for UIDs in strings as well on start_timeline by @coppolaemilio in #2497
• Fixed indenting error by @DiggingNebula8 in #2506
• Add accessibility settings, implement image preview field by @salianifo in #2449
• Fix a typo when applying italic font in text bubbles by @mmatyas in #2513
• Allows jump to be a variable, making the jump event dynamic by @kirbynator in #2495
• Various improvements by @Jowan-Spooner in #2508
• Added a multithreading loading by @RightSorcerer in #2522
• Combine Music/Sound event into single Audio event by @salianifo in #2488
• Multiple fixes by @Jowan-Spooner in #2528
• Add Timeline Shortcut Cheat Sheet by @Jowan-Spooner in #2529
• Immediately load persistent info to prevent overwritting by @HuntJSparra in #2530
• Add Signal text_started that aligns with the text appearing by @Snowdrama in #2523
• Fixes for 4.2, textbubble, missing audio files and cleanup by @Jowan-Spooner in #2532
• Added focus_choice_button_node function to Choices subsystem by @DJLink in #2499
• Feature: Play from here by @Jowan-Spooner in #2535
• Implement proper timeline ending logic by @Jowan-Spooner in #2536
• fix: potential infinite loop on DialogicResourceUtil.gd by @AleryBerry in #2421
• Improve runtime resources (timelines and characters created through code) by @Jowan-Spooner in #2537
• Make ending timeline not emit timeline_started signal by @Jowan-Spooner in #2542
• Text Editor: Improve toggle comments shortcut by @Jowan-Spooner in #2541
• Timeline Editor: Add Replace functionality to search by @Jowan-Spooner in #2550
• Apply new overrides when switching styles if there's a common ancestor by @Galo223344 in #2556
• fix the node type as AudioStreamPlayer by @endaye in #2557
• Events: Simplify logic for branching / end branches by @Jowan-Spooner in #2559
• Improving/fixing issues with Speaker signal and Highlight methods by @Jowan-Spooner in #2543
• Improve slide animations by @Jowan-Spooner in #2540
• Adds mouse filter to bubble by @tiagojdf in #2562
• Choices: Add override for custom choice buttons by @HuntJSparra in #2554
• Godot 4.4.1 Update (mainly UID stuff) by @Jowan-Spooner in #2560
• Various Fixes by @Jowan-Spooner in #2564

New Contributors

• @rberends made their first contribution in #2470
• @ssw940521 made their first contribution in #2464
• @orangemelon69 made their first contribution in #2503
• @shazzner made their first contribution in #2480
• @DiggingNebula8 made their first contribution in #2506
• @mmatyas made their first contribution in #2513
• @kirbynator made their first contribution in #2495
• @RightSorcerer made their first contribution in #2522
• @HuntJSparra made their first contribution in #2530
• @Snowdrama made their first contribution in #2523
• @DJLink made their first contribution in #2499
• @AleryBerry made their first contribution in #2421
• @Galo223344 made their first contribution in #2556
• @tiagojdf made their first contribution in #2562

Full Changelog: 2.0-alpha-16...2.0-alpha-17