Resource Cost Tooltip

posted on September 27th, 2013, 6:07 pm

How do I change the way that resource costs are displayed in the build tooltips? Specifically, I would like to be able to see the crew cost for ships and stations.

posted on September 28th, 2013, 2:10 am

I think that for the verbose tooltip we disabled that via hardcode - for regular tooltip, it will display crew cost still.

In v4 we have additional commands that make this a switch rather than something you can't alter

posted on September 28th, 2013, 3:00 am

So a viable workaround would be to adjust the tooltip delay and use the brief tooltips, correct?

posted on September 28th, 2013, 3:11 am

That is a workaround, but I don't know if I would consider it viable - the regular tooltip is quite ugly. It organizes text differently than the verbose tooltip and in a way that's not that great for (at least our) gameplay (which is why we don't use it in FO). In fact, recently we had considered using the regular and verbose tooltips in conjunction, only to realize very rapidly how ugly the normal tooltip is

Sorry for the inconvenience

posted on September 28th, 2013, 6:09 am

That's OK, I'll figure something out.

posted on September 28th, 2013, 5:56 pm

Figured out a work around. I set the verbosetooltipdelay in component.odf to 1000 and had the basic tooltip reference the same bit of Dynamic_Localized_Strings.h as the verbose tooltip. The verbose tooltip is no longer displayed so you see only the basic tooltip, but they both have the same formatting and same data with the exception of the basic tooltip's crew cost display.

EDIT: I also noticed that Dynamic_Localized_Strings.h uses symbols to indicate when a resource icon is supposed to be presented. Are those hardcoded or is there a sprite entry I can edit to change the texture and coordinates they reference?

EDIT 2: Nevermind, found the texture.

posted on September 28th, 2013, 8:07 pm

Yes, you can change which icon you choose to use - I don't recall what it is off the top of my head though

posted on September 29th, 2013, 5:02 am

Read too fast : Unless you found something special, using the regular tooltip will cause hotkeys to be displayed after the text, rather than before it, as in the verbose tooltip. That's what I meant by ugly changes .

posted on September 29th, 2013, 5:24 pm

I just discovered that the ship cap text does not display properly in the short tooltips, showing GUI_CP_MAXBUILD instead of the appropriate text. Since I'm using those in my project, I'll go back to the verbose tooltips and fake the crew cost by using a resource I'm not using and giving players an infinite supply of it. For instance, give ships a latinum cost equal to crew cost, tweaking Dynamic_Localized_Strings.h to give the latinum cost tooltip the crew icon, then give the players an effectively infinite supply of latinum the same way the AI has an effectively infinite supply of supply. Combo that with actually using crew and it should be a mildly insane but fully-invisible-during-play work around.