Here's what I've done: the count turns red whenever it exceeds 8192, and the first time this happens in the life of an individual dësc-editing window, it pops up a warning message. Really, any description anywhere near that long is probably a bad design decision that will lead players to jump through without reading.

@david-arthur, on Jun 3 2008, 03:37 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0a6 - latest alpha now available:

Really, any description anywhere near that long is probably a bad design decision that will lead players to jump through without reading.

Is that part of the warning?

Pace has pulled off descs that have approached that length, as have others such as Archon and myself. I don't see anything wrong with those kinds of descs; they tell a story and break up the monotony of flying from point A to point B while destroying ship X along the way.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 03 June 2008 - 10:35 PM

Very true. As long as you keep things moving along. Verbosity for verbosity's sake is never good (and something that I'm trying to cut down on (so is parenthesis usage)).

I agree. There are enough games that have no plots out there (Pacman?) The plot is what makes it interesting. There are admittedly some people who like games without plots, but I always liked RPG's more, because they have plots. One of the reasons EV is such a popular series is because it has a plotline.

Plot is important, but if you want that much text, sticking it into a dësc window while the player is eager to get on to the next mission (and may even press Return too quickly by accident) isn't necessarily a good idea. If you want to approach novel-length, I'd recommend Martin Turner's approach of putting it in a separate file; a password-protected PDF should be an appropriate equivalent to his DocMaker files.

I have to admit, while playing Arpia 2, there were times when I just skimmed the text because I wanted to get to the action.
Good idea with the PDFs, I never thought of that.

It was actually quite effective: twice in the course of The Frozen Heart , it would give you a password with which you could un-archive one of the two long documents included with the plug-in, both of which were saved as DocMaker files within password-protected StuffIt archives. The first was supposedly the player's field notes about the language they had to decipher; the second was a novelistic description of what happens planet-side between two missions.

Long descs----of which EV Firefly has more than a few----certainly have their place.

I'd really like it if we could increase the desc font size, though. You can only squint at these things so long.

This post has been edited by Lindley : 04 June 2008 - 09:10 AM

Just increase the font size in a separate program and import the text in. The font used in EVN is Arial, by the way. I always wondered about that but finally found what font it is.

Uh, if you mean increase the font size in another program and copy/paste it into MC or what have you, I don't think that will work. Especially in WinNova, which I believe uses Charcoal.

Really? That's odd. I'll need to try it out.

@shlimazel, on Jun 4 2008, 11:01 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0a6 - latest alpha now available:

Just increase the font size in a separate program and import the text in.

Er, no. dësc resources only hold plain text. They don't store any font, size, or style information.

You'd need to modify your system font files so that 8 point text showed up as size 12 or whatever.

As far as long texts go, what with the advent of conditionals {G "sexist text A" "sexist text B"} it's well possible that a dësc approaching the character limit could actually end up displaying as quite short, if there are many bit-related text-swaps involved.

@qaanol, on Jun 4 2008, 02:03 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0a6 - latest alpha now available:

As far as long texts go, what with the advent of conditionals {G "sexist text A" "sexist text B"} it's well possible that a dësc approaching the character limit could actually end up displaying as quite short, if there are many bit-related text-swaps involved.

True, and this is why I'm neither forcing the player to comply with the 8192-character limit, nor making the warnings overly intrusive.

@jacabyte, on Jun 5 2008, 03:17 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0a6 - latest alpha now available:

Especially in WinNova, which I believe uses Charcoal.

Geneva: Font used by Mac Nova.
Charcoal: Button font used by Mac Nova. (edit) Note this was a standard OS 9 font but is not a standard OS X font. Some users may need to download this from the addons page.
Arial: Font used by Win Nova whenever certain Mac fonts (like Geneva and Charcoal) are requested.
Virtue: Substitute button font included in the Win Nova Resolution Patch since I couldn't work out how to remove Charcoal from Win Nova's blacklist.

This post has been edited by Guy : 05 June 2008 - 03:24 AM

Ah, I thought that I was mistaken about Windows even having the charcoal font...

Question: when working with spin resources, when set to rleD, shouldn't the mask ID be set to -1? If so, I can't do that. It won't let me set it lower than 0.

@captjosh, on Jun 6 2008, 02:08 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0a6 - latest alpha now available:

Question: when working with spin resources, when set to rleD, shouldn't the mask ID be set to -1? If so, I can't do that. It won't let me set it lower than 0.

For MissionComputer: Irrelevant.

For Nova: Irrelevant.

For good plug-in design practice: Leave the RLE resources with even-numbered IDs and set each mask ID to the odd number above its corresponding sprite. That way when DeRLE is used to convert the spďns to PICTs the mask images will be created with the proper IDs.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 06 June 2008 - 02:03 PM