greeting texts

[wewantcaptaindan]

I was actually thinking about the diplomacy messages when I was playing this the other day. I'd be more than happy to take a stab at reworking them if you'd like!

[Iceman]

The more the merrier!

There is still a lot to do re texts in the game.
Take a look in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=300&t=3302
I've updated it with some of what is needed.

Anything that you feel needs to be rewritten, go ahead.

Thanks!

[mooshuo]

Hello again Iceman,

My coding skills is limited to opening txt files and that's about it. So I will need help in locating the files/code to implement diplomacy message changes.

Thanks!

[Iceman]

The files with the diplomacy messages are:

Resources\Data\CivStringDatabase.xml
Resources\Text\DiplomacyText.xaml


The Tones that are currently defined for Supreamacy are:

Calm,
Meek,
Condescending,
Indignant,
Impatient,
Annoyed,
Enraged,
Receptive,
Enthusiastic

But this is kind of excessive I think. I'll let you guys choose which to keep or rename. Then LMK please and I'll remove the rest from the code.


I recommend using Notepad++ to edit the files, or something similar.

Thanks for the interest in helping!
The next release should be very interesting!

[mooshuo]

Awesome! Sorry been a little busy.

I didn't realize the shear number of minor races available. I was wondering for starters we can add more flavor to encounter a new minor/major race. As it stands currently, when you encounter a minor race, it shows the race name, portrait and a little info blurb.

Would it be possibly to expand to display/hear more.

For example:

- Race Name: Zahl (Picture of Zahl species member)

- Text Greeting: "As long as you travel in Zahl territory, you travel among friends."

- Race Diplomacy Report: Zahl info blurb (i.e. Zahl are a friendly race.... etc. etc.)

I think it would add a lot of canon-feel to the diplomacy of the game. To me, the diplomacy screen was most interesting aspects in BOTF as well as meeting new races.

With a major race it could look like this:

- Empire Name: Borg (Picture of Borg Queen)

- Text Greeting: "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

- Race Diplomacy Report: Borg info blurb (i.e. The Borg seek to assimilate everything and so on... etc.)

And to add even more seasoning, if we could add soundbites straight from the episodes/movies (Zahl, VOY: Year of Hell, Part 1 / Borg, ST: First Contact),that would be even more awesome. If we can't do with the soundbites, I think adding text greetings to every race would be great for Supremacy.

[Danijel]

Issue at this moment is that you have only one guy dedicated to game coding, so even good ideas are only placed on "to-do" list, since some things that are related to gameplay have a higher priority and overall influence. Would be awesome if few more ppl would jump in and help out with simple textual things like one you mentioned, Iceman will gladly check things afterwards, im sure of it

[Iceman]

Damn straight, Danijel!

@mooshuo

Would it be possibly to expand to display/hear more.

For example:

- Race Name: Zahl (Picture of Zahl species member)

- Text Greeting: "As long as you travel in Zahl territory, you travel among friends."

- Race Diplomacy Report: Zahl info blurb (i.e. Zahl are a friendly race.... etc. etc.)

I think it would add a lot of canon-feel to the diplomacy of the game. To me, the diplomacy screen was most interesting aspects in BOTF as well as meeting new races.

Not sure exactly what you mean here.
On first contact, you already get the civ's name picture, along with a sound clip (a general one for minors, a customized one for empires - taken from BotF). The greeting text you get is the diplomacy report (found in DiplomacyReport in Civilizations.xml ). The encyclopedia shows a description of the race (found in Description in Races.xml).

So what exactly do you feel is missing? Is it the texts that are not appropriate, or something else?
If the former, then like Danijel already said, all help we can get is most welcome. The more people helping out, the faster things will get done.

There is a pending issue at BitBucket to have customized diplo reports for each empire, BTW. I could look into making the code changes, but copy+past'ing the reports for all the empires would take a huge amount of time which I cannot divert from more important stuff.
https://bitbucket.org/mstrobel/supremac ... diplomatic

And to add even more seasoning, if we could add soundbites straight from the episodes/movies (Zahl, VOY: Year of Hell, Part 1 / Borg, ST: First Contact),that would be even more awesome. If we can't do with the soundbites, I think adding text greetings to every race would be great for Supremacy.

Get me the soundbites, and whatever soundfx from BotF you want included (which eventually they will be), in the proper format and I'll add them!

[mooshuo]

Oh sorry for not making it clear.

So what I was proposing was exactly the same thing you did here for the Borg: https://puu.sh/Ajauu/872a2c61ba.jpg

But, we do it for minor races for instance the Pakled: https://puu.sh/AjaqJ/e99f24d201.jpg

Just above where it says 'The Pakled are a shining example... etc' we can put in an iconic text quote from a Pakeld.

"We are smart."

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Pakled

That's what I meant by greeting.

[Iceman]

Oh, ok.
I'm not sure "We are smart" is much of a greeting text, but I see your point.
The easy way to do this is to add those quotes to the current DiplomacyReport (like you proposed), or rewrite them as if it was the civ talking to you.
Another way is to add another field for the greeting texts.

Regardless, someone will have to add those texts

[mooshuo]

<Civilization Key="ZIBALIANS">
<Race>ZIBALIANS</Race>
<ShortName>Zibalians</ShortName>
<LongName>Zibalians</LongName>
<DiplomacyReport>The Zibalians are merchants who maintain a number of trade holdings across multiple sectors. But they are buyers rather than sellers, and some are thieves.</DiplomacyReport>
<HomeSystemName>Zibal</HomeSystemName>
<Color>White</Color>
<HomeQuadrant>Beta</HomeQuadrant>
<CivilizationType>MinorPower</CivilizationType>
<TechCurve>TechCurve3</TechCurve>
<CivTraits>Mercantile</CivTraits>
</Civilization>

---

Ok, how do I add a new field between Longname and diplomacy report?

Also if I were add a quote to DiplomacyReport, how do I make a line space in between?

<DiplomacyReport>"Hello, this is a test." The Zibalians are merchants who maintain a number of trade holdings across multiple sectors. But they are buyers rather than sellers, and some are thieves.</DiplomacyReport>

[Danijel]

Till Iceman drops around, i think it was "some text /n other part of text" or \n
try this for ref
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/358 ... ble-quotes

[Iceman]

Like this:

<DiplomacyReport>"Hello, this is a test."

The Zibalians are merchants who maintain a number of trade holdings across multiple sectors. But they are buyers rather than sellers, and some are thieves.</DiplomacyReport>



Check the <Description> of empires in Races.xml , there are a few examples.


And like this:

<LongName>Zibalians</LongName>
<NameOfNewProperty>whatever you want to add</NameOfNewProperty>
<DiplomacyReport>The Zibalians are merchants who maintain a number of trade holdings across multiple sectors. But they are buyers rather than sellers, and some are thieves.</DiplomacyReport>

I need to add this to the code though, and the schema also needs to be updated.


---

I think first we should agree on how to go about this?
Do you guys think we should keep the DiplomacyReport for the civ description in the diplomacy screen, the Description for the Encyclopedia, and add a new tag for the greeting text?
Or some other solution?

The DiplomacyReport texts should probably be split into a separate database to allow the implementation of issue #385, linked above.

[mooshuo]

I'm down for adding a greeting text section

The Diplomacy report and description was shown at encounters of new races in the original BOTF so I would thinking keeping it similar would be good.

The Diplomacy report on each race also had a voiceover from an empire too. So there were in a sense 5 different reports per minor race per empire.

Let me know, and I will make some cool greetings! Get the Trek feel in there.

[Iceman]

Ok, go ahead then.
Should we start a new thread for this, so that it's easier to trck progress, and/or coordinate things if other people want to help out too? There are 170+ minors after all

The number of minors will also be a problem for the voiceovers, we have 30 from BotF, but the remaining ones would have to be recorded...

[mooshuo]

Sure we can start a new thread. I think the voice-overs for empire diplomacy reports can wait for now. I want to concentrate on just the greetings for every minor race.