[WIP] - Custom Captain's Log Entries

[panthercules]

Well, right now I'm stuck doing what I was doing in SH3 - manually editing the saved game log file in notepad between game sessions. I still love looking at it in my log book in game, especially since I figured out how to enlarge the clipboard so you can read the log entries in game better, but I'm frustrated by a couple of things ATM:

(1) SH4 seems to be less tolerant of long entries than SH3 was, so you have to keep each entry pretty short or it doesn't work (which I solve just by making more short entries instead of fewer long ones, but it does make the log-file editing more fiddly); and

(2) I have no usable programming skills (I used to know how to write things in BASIC, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away) so I don't have any way to either (a) come up with something you could alt-tab to and edit/make log entries while in game (and I'm not sure the game would recognize them anyway so that's not a big deal unless it could be made so you could really make real-time entries - that would be awesome), or (b) take the edited saved-log file and turn it into nice-looking, cleaned up log reports like SH3 Commander would do - it doesn't seem like that would be that hard, but it's way beyond me. I hope that function will make it into SH4-Skipper, but since that seems to be taking a while to come out, I wish someone with some skills would whip up a little something just to do this. The way it is now, once I finish a patrol I don't really have any way to view the log again other than to wade through the saved log file with all its formatting commands, etc.

What would really be nice is some simple little applet that would let you just type the date, time, and text log entry info into fields and then automatically put that info into the syntax form that the game's saved-log files need (and renumber all the other log entries as necessary), so that those entries would show up in the game's clipboard display.

Hmmm - if I could find my old database program I used to play around with, I might even be able to write something that would automate the data entry like that - trouble is, even if I could figure that part out, it would only work for people who had that same database program (basically, just for me), so it wouldn't be nearly as good a solution than if someone who knows how to write simple stuff like this could just whip something up for all us sub skippers. Any takers?

[panthercules]

BTW - further play with this revealed a small problem with an occasional word sometimes being missing along the right edge in some of the log entries in game - it only happened occasionally and I never could figure out exactly why it was happening, BUT a small tweak to the numbers in my post above seems to have eliminated the problem, at least as far as I've been able to tell so far.

I had posted above to change (among other things) the following line in the menu_1024_768.ini file:

[G35 I19]
Zone= 613 553 445 480 4 1 0x35060000 0.5 -0.5 0x35040000 -0.5 0.4 -5 -10

If you change the third number from 445 to 455, so the line now reads:

[G35 I19]
Zone= 613 553 455 480 4 1 0x35060000 0.5 -0.5 0x35040000 -0.5 0.4 -5 -10

all the words seem to show up where they didn't before, at least in my tests so far. The other pages (radio messages and mission objectives) didn't seem to need a similar change so I haven't messed with the numbers I previously posted for those other lines yet. Of course, as previously stated, these numbers are all for 1024x768 and you may need to adjust them accordingly if you run a different resolution and don't like the way these numbers work for that resolution.

A sample of my latest patrol log in game, after this tweak/fix, is shown below:



Enjoy!

[MaxT.dk]

Looks very nice!

[panthercules]

Ok - since a wonderful discovery was made by LukeFF about how to make the recognition manual open back up to the same page you were last looking at, but it only seems to work at resolutions higher than 1024x768 (see this thread: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...d=1#post565405 ), I decided to start running at 1280x960 to take advantage of this. While I was at it, I decided I would enlarge the captain's log clipboard to take advantage of the increased real estate at the higher resolution - soooo, here are the revised settings for the menu_1024_768.ini file that work at 1280x960, in case anybody wants to use them:

[G35 I19]
Zone= 613 553 589 600 4 1 0x35060000 0.5 -0.5 0x35040000 -0.5 0.4 -5 -20

[G35 I21]
Zone= 613 624 310 35 3 1 0x35040000 0 0 0x35060002 0 1 150 45

[G35 I27]
Zone= 573 186 140 30 0 1 0x35060000 0 -1 0x35060003 0.12 1.36 3 -155

[G35 I29]
Zone= 613 552 556 556 4 1 0x35050000 0.5 -0.5 0x35030000 -0.5 0.435 -5 -32

[G35 I33]
Zone= 689 623 158 35 3 1 0x35030000 0.5 0 0x3505001B -0.5 1 0 48

[G35 I39]
Zone= 573 186 140 30 0 1 0x35050000 0 -1 0x35050001 0.12 1.36 3 -160

[G35 I41]
Zone= 613 553 556 556 4 1 0x35070000 0.5 -0.5 0x35080000 -0.5 0.4 -5 -32

[G35 I43]
Zone= 613 624 310 35 0 1 0x35080000 0.5 0 0x35070001 -0.5 1 2 65

[G35 I46]
Zone= 573 186 140 30 0 1 0x35070000 0 -1 0x35070007 0.12 1.36 3 -160

[G35 I50]
Zone= 613 586 310 32 0 1 0x3500000F 0.5 -0.5 0x35000002 -0.5 4.4 0 115

[G35 I51]
Zone= 552 743 731 938 0 1 0x35000000 0.75 -1 0x3500000F -0.5 1.25 -100 -115


Enjoy!

[ReallyDedPoet]

Nice work on this, miss this option from SH2.

RDP

[panthercules]

Check the first post, which has been updated with the info on how to get this to work with Patch 1.4.

Enjoy!

[Roger Dodger]

Is it possible to change the Captain's Log Header to read something like this: . . . ?
CAPTAIN'S LOG
S-33 (USS 138)
LtCdr Roger Dodger
<DATE>
. . . BODY OF LOG . . .

Basic setup:

CAPTAIN'S LOG
<BOAT NAME> <(OFFICIAL NUMBER)>
<RANK> <NAME>
<DATE>