Is it possible to modify the news ticker?

[Ducio 285]

Is it possible to modify the news ticker? It would be fun to add news items relevant to the region you're working on, like maybe, announcing the baseball team's championship, local Schrödinger cat stuck in box, or whatever.

[rsc204 21,866]

Sure it's possible to do, all of these messages are triggered by LUA scripts inside the SimCity_1.dat file. The messages themselves are probably just LText files with the text. The harder part, is re-writing the LUA to trigger your custom messages. But if you just wanted to alter the existing ones, that'd be much easier. All the LText's I believe would be inside the Locale file.

[Propfam 2,303]

Obviously and the name and the description is LTEXT based so it's easy to modify. But to add, you need Lua scripts.

[Morgan R 156]

On 1/10/2021 at 6:52 PM, rsc204 said:

Sure it's possible to do, all of these messages are triggered by LUA scripts inside the SimCity_1.dat file. The messages themselves are probably just LText files with the text. The harder part, is re-writing the LUA to trigger your custom messages. But if you just wanted to alter the existing ones, that'd be much easier. All the LText's I believe would be inside the Locale file.

I can confirm that that's where they are in both cases.

Here is where the "fluff" messages are located:

Here is the code for one of the messages (they appear to pretty much be the same for the "fluff" type ones):



The "a7619f2" is the location of the specific LTEXT file that contains the desired string in the localization .dat

Aside: The 'Stupid News Ticker' Mod (one of the major attempts at changing the news ticker) erased unwanted messages by merely changing the formatting by making them comments, and in the case of the fluff, appear to have deleted most of them.

I have been wanting to a make historical-period-specific fluff text mod, but don't know much about Lua, etc., and so have a couple of questions now:

1.) Do the strings have to be localized (i.e reference the LTEXT in the localization file)? And if not, how would one format it right there in the lua file?
2.) Is there anything that would stop the creation of new triggers? (aside from the need to create an ID I'm not sure the nature of (see in the example above: "ea89ac36")
3.) While I don't know Lua, and if indeed one can add in new messages, it looks like the trigger could be changed as well (e.g. here, to add new messages that reflect the changing population of the city or some other factor, and customize it to suit the needs of smaller or larger places. Is this correct?

[CorinaMarie 29,882]

Tis been quite a long time since I poked around in the Lua scripts, but here's what my memory suggests:

1 hour ago, Morgan R said:

1.) Do the strings have to be localized (i.e reference the LTEXT in the localization file)? And if not, how would one format it right there in the lua file?

Yes. That is the best way. As I recall they did originally set it so it could be coded in line, but then changed them to peek in the LTEXT even if coded in line within the advice record.

 

1 hour ago, Morgan R said:

2.) Is there anything that would stop the creation of new triggers? (aside from the need to create an ID I'm not sure the nature of (see in the example above: "ea89ac36")

Nothing at all to stop the creation.

You can have as many as you want providing they use unique IIDs. The CA63E2A3-4A5E8EF6-FFAEC42B Lua entry is a notes file that explains some of it and gives an example or two. (Unrelated, but the CA63E2A3-4A5E8F3F-FFE6C952 is the Automata notes file.)

You will want to modify that particular Lua file entry (CA63E2A3-4A5E8EF6-FFA79144) you show above for fluff because adding new entries in the left hand pane requires the proper hash string conversion-to-name which the dofile command can recognize. (Plus it is better to issue said dofile command elsewhere from Lua system memory level rather than game level like that one is.)

Ofc, you can also edit any of the other advice Lua scripts too if what you are adding fits a different category better.

 

1 hour ago, Morgan R said:

3.) While I don't know Lua, and if indeed one can add in new messages, it looks like the trigger could be changed as well (e.g. here, to add new messages that reflect the changing population of the city or some other factor, and customize it to suit the needs of smaller or larger places. Is this correct?

That is correct. You can write the a.trigger as simple or as complex as you like using greater than, less than, or equal comparisons along with Boolean connections. For variables you can test against in your trigger, look in CA63E2A3-4A5E8EF6-FF048A3E. Variables in many of the tables can be the subject of your comparison such as those in game_events, game_trends, tuning_constants, and others.

[Ducio 285]

Thanks everyone! I'll try experimenting when I have some downtime.