Building

Dialogs

A dialog is the screen a server opens on a player — added in Minecraft 1.21.6. It is not a container: it has no slots, and its buttons are real buttons that run real commands.

What makes it worth drawing is that a dialog is made of text. Its title, the lines in its body and every button's label are text components, and a text component can be a font glyph. So a pack can put a whole 256×256 picture in the body and a piece of drawn artwork in each button's face, and what comes back is a screen that looks nothing like Minecraft with buttons that still work.

A dialog needs a plugin, and 1.21.6

The picture is in your resource pack. The dialog itself is not — it is datapack data, which a resource pack cannot carry. RP Engine is what writes it on the server and opens it. On anything older than 1.21.6 the game has no dialog screen at all; a GUI is the older way to do the same job and works everywhere.

Drawing one#

A dialog is edited in the same editor a GUI is, with one difference: instead of slot guides it has button guides, and those are the whole layout.

Each dashed box is where the game will draw one of the dialog's buttons. Paint inside a box and that artwork becomes the button's face; leave it empty and the button keeps vanilla's grey widget and your words. Everything outside the boxes is the panel — the frame, the heading, whatever you want behind it.

The boxes move when the dialog does. Add a button, change one's width, switch from two columns to three, and the guides move to where the game will put them. So set the buttons up first and paint into them second.

What a button can do#

One thing each, chosen in the Dialog panel beside the canvas:

Action	What happens
Run command	The player runs it, with their own permissions.
Suggest command	It goes into their chat box unsent.
Open link	The client asks before following it.
Copy text	Onto their clipboard.
Open another dialog	By id — `studio:<asset>` for one of yours.
Nothing	Which, with "After a press: Close", is what an Ok button is.

A command runs as the player, so it obeys their permissions. A button that needs more than they have wants a command the server has set up for it, not a higher-privileged button — there is no such thing.

Inputs#

A dialog can ask for something: a text box, a checkbox, a list to pick from or a slider. Each has a key, and any button's command can write $(key) and get what the player put there.

tp @s $(destination)

How many buttons is what kind of dialog#

Minecraft has three shapes and they differ in nothing but the count, so there is nothing to choose:

one button is a notice
two are a yes/no
three or more are a grid, laid out in the column count you set

Generating one#

Describe the screen and the generator decides its size, what it is made of, what it says and what the buttons are called. It draws one image — the panel's surface — and composes the frame, the heading, the words and every button face out of that one palette. Tick Don't draw a texture and it draws none at all, which is instant, free, and a perfectly good slate-grey dialog.

It names the buttons; you wire them

Nothing invents a command. A generated dialog arrives with its buttons named and their actions empty, because a command is a thing with consequences on your server.

Getting it onto a server#

Pair the pack with a server running RP Engine and push it, the same way you test anything else. Then:

/rp dialogs                     # what the server has
/rp dialog studio:quest-board   # open one

The panel in the editor has the exact command for the dialog you are looking at.

A pushed dialog opens straight away

No restart, and nothing to enable. RP Engine sends the whole dialog inside the command that opens it, so a dialog you pushed a moment ago is ready the moment the push lands. Push, open.

There is one thing a restart still adds. RP Engine also writes your dialogs into a datapack of its own, and after the next restart each one is a real namespace:id — which is what lets you name it from your own datapack, from a command block, or from a minecraft:show_dialog click event you wrote by hand. That half is registry data, and registry data is read when the server loads its world. /minecraft:reload does not do it: a reload rebuilds recipes, advancements, loot and tags, and this registry is built with the world instead.

If the picture sits a few pixels off#

Where the game puts a dialog's body relative to its buttons is layout inside the client, and it is not something a pack can read — so the placement here is worked out rather than looked up, and a Minecraft release that moves a padding moves every drawn dialog with it.

The Nudge fields in the Dialog panel are the fix. Type the offset, save, look again. It is stored on that dialog, so it survives everything else you do to it.