Changing Color of "Bad Messages"

[Jerh9e1k5]

Hey Guys,

I was playing last night and was sneak attacked by Montezuma. He landed a small attack force which I easily dealt with, but then kept his ships around to bombard my cities. Every turn he would go through a round of bombardment, reducing my citie's defenses. This made those red messages alerting me that someone is attacking me come up. I found it very frustrating though when a landing party on the other side of my continent went unnoticed because of the useless bombardment messages cluttering the screen.

I was wondering if it would be possible to change the color of the bombardment messages from red to white, or something similar. In fact I find the red is difficult to read, so perhaps change the red messages to yellow messages, and keep the bombardment messages red.

Could this be done? I think it would greatly improve the war time experience for me.

Thank you very much!
Anxiously awaiting an answer
Jerh9e1k5

[rogerbacon]

That's a good suggestion. I hope it can be done.

Roger Bacon

[Jerh9e1k5]

Thanks for keeping the thread alive rogerbacon! I was worried it would fall into the abyss...

[ExplorerJim]

I was looking through some of the xml last night, found this section in \Assets\XML\Interface\CIV4ColorVals.xml

ColorVal
Type COLOR_WARNING_TEXT
fRed 1.00
fGreen 0.30
fBlue 0.30
fAlpha 1.00

ColorVal
Type COLOR_POSITIVE_TEXT
fRed 0.50
fGreen 1.00
fBlue 0.10
fAlpha 1.00

ColorVal
Type COLOR_NEGATIVE_TEXT
fRed 1.00
fGreen 0.30
fBlue 0.30
fAlpha 1.00

Various Tag closings etc removed as i haven't figured out how to use this forum software properly yet But either these or one of the other settings in that file should change the colour of the messages. Changing the bombardment message separately is probably a python thing though.

hth
Jim

[rogerbacon]

Thanks. That probably will do it. I've made the changes and now I'm just waiting for a barbarian to appear.

Roger Bacon

[Adagio]

I would prefer these 'bad' messages to be a little different:

I would prefer them to be popup boxes of the most important messages (reduced defense would still be as red messages in the upper left corner), while "The enemy has been spotted" should be show as popup msgs. I don't know how many times the enemy has attacked my cities because "I was never notified" of their arrival near my cities

[Jerh9e1k5]

Yes an option to make them pop-ups would be nice Adagio, good idea.

Good find ExplorerJim living up to your name! :P

rogerbacon once you can test whether the colours do in fact change I would greatly appreciate if you could post in detail how it was done. I know that it would be simply a matter of changing some text in a file somewhere, but I have no idea where the file is located, or where in the document to find the alterations.

Thanks a lot!
Jerh9e1k5

[rogerbacon]

Originally posted by Jerh9e1k5

rogerbacon once you can test whether the colours do in fact change I would greatly appreciate if you could post in detail how it was done. I know that it would be simply a matter of changing some text in a file somewhere, but I have no idea where the file is located, or where in the document to find the alterations.

Thanks a lot!
Jerh9e1k5

I will do that. Today I've been busy making my first mod (TrainingBarracks mod) so I haven't had a chance to actually play the game.

Roger Bacon

[rogerbacon]

I changed the warning text section to:

COLOR_WARNING_TEXT
     fRed>0.30
     fGreen>0.30
     fBlue>1.00
     fAlpha>1.00

which should have made it look blue but I didn't notice any change. I guess we need to look elsewhere.

Roger Bacon

[ExplorerJim]

Originally posted by rogerbacon
I changed the warning text section to:

COLOR_WARNING_TEXT
     fRed>0.30
     fGreen>0.30
     fBlue>1.00
     fAlpha>1.00

which should have made it look blue but I didn't notice any change. I guess we need to look elsewhere.

Roger Bacon

Indeed, and on my continuing travels through XML hell I found some useful things in Assets\XML\Text\CIV4GameTextInfos.xml

Specifically, line 14228 has a section entitled TXT_KEY_MISC_ENEMY_TROOPS_SPOTTED

and the english entry reads:
The enemy has been spotted near %s1_CityName!

so taking the tagging idea demonstrated in the section above that I changed the entry to:

[COLOR_YELLOW]The enemy has been spotted near %s1_CityName![COLOR_REVERT]

(all between the English tags) and in game, hey presto! Barbarian warnings in yellow . The COLOR_ labels are those in CIV4ColorVals.xml, and remember to hold down the shift key while starting Civ4 to use fresh, uncached xml

have fun

Jim

oh yeah, and at line 14624 onwards are a couple of sections on bombardment messages, if you want to play with them.