Quest format questions

[BansheeXYZ]

So I'm reading the quest files and finding them line-heavy and hard to read. Was it ever considered that classic's way of creating manually defined line breaks be done away with? I guess I don't see their value atm. (Note that I'm only referring to the fake-a-margin line breaks, not paragraph breaks, which will still need a <br> tag or something.) Can we not automatically center and wrap based on a fixed margin?

I mean, imagine making an edit or insertion on the 2nd line of a 10 line paragraph, and the next 8 lines then need to be edited as well because of the margin overflow you caused with that insertion. It just seems ridiculous that anyone writing a quest file would need to carefully manage their own margins like this.

Also, there are <ce> and <---> tags everywhere due to this. If the end of the line could serve as the end of the response variant, it would look much better. And you wouldn't have to worry about a missing tag or something. There's just more room for error here with all these tags and indents and manual margins.

In other words, this:

Code: Select all

QuestorOffer:  [1000]
<ce>                     My name is _questgiver_. Can
<ce>                   you help me find my friend? I can
<ce>                       only pay you _gold_ gold.
                                     <--->
<ce>               Please help me. My friend _missingperson_
<ce>               is missing. I am afraid that %g might have
<ce>                 been hurt. I will pay you _gold_ gold
<ce>                        pieces if you find %g2.

RefuseQuest:  [1001]
<ce>             Good day, %ra. I will look for someone else.
                                     <--->
<ce>                     Is no-one willing to help me?
                                     <--->
<ce>                     A thousand pardons. I mistook
<ce>                      you for a heroic adventurer.

vs this:

Code: Select all

[1000][QuestorOffer_to_Player]
My name is _questgiver_. Can you help me find my friend? I can only pay you _gold_ gold.
Please help me. My friend _missingperson is missing. I am afraid that %g might have been hurt. I will pay you _gold_ gold  pieces if you find %g2.

[1001][QuestorResponse_to_PlayerRefusing]
Good day, %ra. I will look for someone else.
Is no-one willing to help me?
A thousand pardons. I mistook you for a heroic adventurer.

[Jay_H]

There are times when it's preferable not to center text, like with a letter or other written document in-game. But what you've described is accurate:

I mean, imagine making an edit or insertion on the 2nd line of a 10 line paragraph, and the next 8 lines then need to be edited as well because of the margin overflow you caused with that insertion. It just seems ridiculous that anyone writing a quest file would need to carefully manage their own margins like this.

A problem further out on the horizon is resolutions. If you put too much text on one line in the current iteration, it'll go beyond the screen boundaries for a very small resolution.

[BansheeXYZ]

There are times when it's preferable not to center text, like with a letter or other written document in-game. But what you've described is accurate

Yep, only dialog boxes get centered. However, every text group in quest files is preceded by a number, so, for example, log entries are [1020], DFU knows to left align that based on where it's going to presented. So it doesn't appear that we need the quest file to be full of alignment tags like <center> and stuff. Is that what the <ce> tag is, a centering tag?

Seems like the only reason to not change is to break up text in exactly the same places as classic, but to me, text is text. It's going to read the same regardless of where the linebreaks are.

Whose program is exporting these files from their original QBN/QRC?

[Jay_H]

As far as I know, Interkarma wrote the extraction program.

I like the idea of having text blocks decide the centering or not. You're right: <ce> means a line of centered text. Having it decided all by paragraphs would be quite useful.

If your idea were engineered, it would have to find compatibility with the existing classic quests which all use <ce> tags.

[BansheeXYZ]

If your idea were engineered, it would have to find compatibility with the existing classic quests which all use <ce> tags.

What would have to happen is to decide on a fixed message box width (out of 200px). Classic tends to be about 125px. You could probably offer a range setting in the ini file of 100 to 150.

[BansheeXYZ]

Thems some good ol margins there, classic...

logmrgn.png (23.06 KiB) Viewed 3988 times