AI War 2:Journal Entries

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Revision as of 14:12, 28 April 2020 by X4000Chris (talk | contribs)
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Hey!

The content that used to be on this page has moved to " Custom Text Messages To The Player", as that's really a less-formal and chat-embedded type of journal entry. It also requires some custom coding. That was the only way to do things prior to us adding in the actual codified journal entries with their dedicated sidebar, etc.

Thew New Style Of Journal Entries

These were introduced in version 2.03x of the game.

Creating New Journal Entries

So, you want to write journal entry or five? Depending on your goals and how you want these to appear, there are various ways you can call them. But no matter what, the basics of how you create one is always the same. That's what we will cover here, field by field:

unique_id

This is a series of ASCII characters (a string), and it's the one thing stored in savegames. This entry is longer than most, but please read it.

  • Uniqueness:
    • This really does need to be unique!
    • If you give your entry an obvious ID like unique_id="GolemFound", then it's a pretty good bet that somebody else will do that also at some point.
    • If you're a modder, then generic IDs are a really great way to wind up with lots of errors when people try to load your mod and someone else's at the same time.
    • Putting your initials or handle is certainly a good way to make it truly unique: CMP_x4000_FirstTime_HiveGolemName would be an example of something that someone else is unlikely to EVER accidentally reuse.
  • Brevity:
    • "CMP_x4000_FirstTime_HiveGolem" is fine from a uniqueness standpoint, but at 29 characters it's awful from a brevity standpoint.
    • Each character in the name is saved into the savegame, raw, at a rate of 1 byte per character.
    • How many journal entries will we really be saving? Probably not that many, compared to something like ships. But let's be reasonable everywhere we can.
    • Adopting something much more brief like "CMP4_1st_HiveGol" is 16 characters, but just as readable to me, and just as likely to be unique.

Striking a balance is a good idea. "CP4FirHivGo" is even more brief, and still likely unique, but incomprehensible.