Now as a fair warning, this guide will be heavy on the scripting. All we do here will be accomplished with a script event and well, a script. But it should be easy enough to incorporate in your own designs even without coding knowledge.

All together we have four different ways of communicating with the player. There might be more, hidden somewhere in the code, but I am sure the four I'll mention will be more then enough.

Before we jump right into it, I'd like to tell you a little bit about paths (as in file paths) in the game. All the example in this guide will be executed with one single test scenario including the mars island and a fridge (yes, a fridge, you'll see). the scenario is a custom scenario, not an add-on. Basically I just opened up the editor, hit new, made the scene and saved. That's all. Those scenarios get saved here:

In my example scenario, I use the following script path:


which means, it lies in the "external" file location (where the scenarios are saved). The folder structure I used is arbitrary, it might as well have been something different, allthough it is strongly recommended to use the same structure the main game is using.

Alright, enough talk, let's get to it.

The first of the "four" I'd like to show you is the classic message or popup box. It is also something I recommend not to use. Mainly because it requires the user to enable his mouse cursor and click it away with the OK button (the ENTER key is also a way to dismiss the message). That said, you should use it if there is something very important to be relayed to the player that he has to acknowledge:



The reason I personally don't like this one is that it reminds me to much of a normal desktop application and not a game, but that's my opinion, you might see it differently of course.

Almost forgot, in order to use that in your event script, code this please:

The ID is rather obscure to me, I assume it is ment as a way for the game to distinguish the different message box objects or something like that. In all fairness, in what I have tried, it didn't matter, I used 1, and it worked.

Of course you can use string IDs you have defined in the language *.xml files, which is the way to go to enable yourself (or others) to translate those strings.

Now this type of message box is, just like the rest following, something that appears on the screen and disappears after a preset amount of time.

All of those are summened by a single method call:

And the meaning is:

Depending on which layout is beeing used, not every parameter gets used. We can call this method several times in a row, each message gets displayed in succession.


This type requires the usage of the layout:

And this is how it looks:



In order to code it, the following line is neccassary:

Caution, this layout has no use for the messages, only the caption is being displayed.


This version uses the caption aswell as a mesage, allthough it shouldn't be long. Test it to be sure. The layout to be used is:
[layout]gui/layouts/tkom_popupmsg_2.layout[/code]

And this is how it looks:



In order to code it, the following line is neccassary:

You have two more layouts available, yes, you guessed it, "*_popupmsg_3.layout" and "*_popupmsg_4.layout", both are similar to the first two, only a different font size. Try them out to see which one you like best.

Now this one is pretty. In terms of coding it works just as the previous ones, only the layout used is different:

Use it to relay that something is wrong...or that you REALLY like red crosses :)

And that is how it looks:

Similar to the error message this one displays a success message:

And this is how it looks:



There are more, check out the available layouts in the workbench and experiment a bit, or go nuts and create your own layout, why not?!

There is another way to display messages to the player, or rather his thoughts. Playing the scenario made by Rudy.cz (The Lyot Crater SP prototype scenario) I've realized, just as he did, the hints are awesome to display the players characters thoughts. They aren't as intrusive as the other popup messages, but work in a similar way.

Calling such a hint works like this:

The meaning of the parameters is:

This is the example I have used in the video below:

Yes, you heard right. It's the captains log. Sort of. Your character has an internal log of sorts, to which you can add text lines. Those are being displayed on the datapad.

This is a great way to store information that might not be that important at a certain time but are handy to have stored away.

The invocation is a little bit tricky, but we'll manage, won't we :)

The method call itself is easy:

where entry is the string entry you'd like to add. The hard part is the obj. If we're dealing with a player, it is an object of the type CharacterObject. That in turn is derived from VehicleObject, which defines the AddLogEntry() method. This means, that every vehicle can have a log, but only the players log is being displayed on the datapad.

Now how to get the CharacterObject reference. That is the tricky part. This is one of several ways to do it:

Here 10000001 is my characters id as shown in the scenario editor.

Here's how it looks in the game:

That was it, you made it.

I hope you are prepared now to talk to your players. As a look ahead and to wet your apetite, here's a video of a scenario (under construction) I'm making. It shows messages and a scripted supply drop.





Have fund and gool luck on Mars!