Okiar's SWG Resources

House/Harvester Naming (multi-lines and colours)

or: how I learned to stop worrying and love hexadecimal colour codes and the ingame notepad

aka Eoj's quick guide to naming most things in SWG

• Part: The First

  The rest of the guide below is much easier to follow and use if you've got copy and paste and the notepad set up in game, so I'll start there.

  Copy/Paste commands:
  Go into Options, Controls, Keymap then select the Chat tab. Scroll down until you see the entries for "Chat Edit Copy", "Chat Edit Cut" and "Chat Edit Paste" and bind these to something on your keyboard. I use Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+X and Ctrl+Shift+V 'cos they're almost the same as the normal windows commands, but you can use whatever you find easiest.

  To create and use the Notepad ingame type "/notepad" and it should appear on screen. To get to this notepad outside of the game (which is one of its useful benefits) navigate down your folders in explorer to:
  C:\Games\StarWarsGalaxies\profiles\YourLoginName (note that your game may be installed in a slightly different folder, if so check there)
  and open "notes.txt" (but note that this file won't exist until you run /notepad ingame once) (spot the pun).

• Part: The Second

  Now onto the harvester/house/factory naming.

  Multi-line signs are the easiest ones to do. Open up the notepad, type in whatevever you want the sign to say, eg:

  Eojs Great Big House
  All Welcome
  Access Fee Only 1 million Credits

  Then select all of that text with the mouse, copy it (using the command you mapped above, eg Ctrl-Shift-C). Then in your house (or harvester) select the "Set Name" option, delete all the text already in the box and paste yours in (using the command you mapped earlier, eg Ctrl-Shift-V). You'll only be able to see one line of the text in the box, but don't worry it'll all still be there.

  Now walk outside and check out your house sign!

  Eojs Great Big House
  All Welcome
  Access Fee Only 1 million Credits

  Next is giving your signs colour

  The first thing you need to understand are the colour codes, these are based on hexadecimal RGB colour codes, as used in HTML. To change the text colour of a line you need a backslash ("\") followed by a hash sign ("#") and then your 6 character colour code. Putting it all together with a couple of examples, a pure red colour would be \#FF0000 or a nice, dark orange would be \#FF8C00

  (don't worry if that entire last paragraph looked like gobble-de-gook, I'll link to an easy chart in a minute).

  The only problem is that these codes can be hard to type ingame (especially if you have a non-US keyboard, as an awful lot of us do). It is easiest to set these up in Windows outside of the game (either by logging out, or you should be able to press "Ctrl-Esc" to temporarily swap out of SWG to Windows if you need to). In Windows open up the notes.txt file from above in a program such as Notepad (note that the notes.txt file is only created once you've run /notepad at least once ingame).

  To try this out, try copying the example below into your notes.txt. Open up the notes.txt file from above and copy the code below into it with a blank line before and after it:

   \#006400My House\#ffffff
  \#FFD700In the middle of my street\#ffffff

  Then, once you're back in game try copying that from your notepad to the Set Name box of a house or harvester. You will find that because the colour codes are "invisible" in the notepad selecting the text with the cursor ingame acts a bit funny, so the easiest way to select it is to put the cursor in the empty line below the text then drag it up to the very start of the first line and then goto Structure Management, Set Name paste that into the name box. It might take a couple of goes but you should get it all in the end (what's actually happening is that the cursor is counting and selecting the colour codes, but you can't see them so its difficult to judge it).

  When you look at your house name now it should look like this:

  My House
  In the middle of my street

  For a basic list of colour codes, see this site: HTML Colour Codes (at htmlgoodies.com), or just run a Google search for "HTML color codes" and you should find them. To make your colour take the 6 digit code from that site, put the "\#" before it and Bob's your uncle. To get text back to the default white colour, use \#FFFFFF.

• Part: The third

  You can also get colour in the description of items you sell on the bazaar or your vendors using these techniques, and even put coloured text in your ingame bio by pasting something like this into the description field along with whatever else you might type in there.

  For example, to get last year's hottest joke bio, put something like this into your character bio sheet (note that this isn't CU compatible):

  Type:    zabrak base female
  
  Armour Rating: Medium
  \#f5f259\Effectiveness\#ffffff\
       Kinetic:    20.0%
       Energy:    20.0%
       Blast:    20.0%
       Stun:    20.0%
       Restraint:    20.0%
       Heat:    20.0%
       Cold:    20.0%
       Acid:    20.0%
       Electricity:    20.0%
  \#f5f259\Vulnerability\#ffffff\
       Lightsabre:    -
       Kreetles:    -

  See the folowing Tuesday Tip from the official forums for other related hints and discussion about naming and colour codes: Tuesday Tips - November 2nd: Adding color to your SWG Bio (on SOE's Official SWG forums).

• Part: The fourth

  Finally, not strictly related to this, but still very useful. If you happen to be in a situation where you'll be giving lots of structures the same name over and over (for instance if you want to give all of your harvesters or factories the same name, so that they can act as advertising), you can add a line like this to a macro (note that this will only work for single-line names):

  /nameStructure  \#999999M.O.M.CORP\#ffffff "\#FF4040The Galaxy's Most Huggable Industrialists\#ffffff";

  Or if you're the really lazy type (and who isn't) you can create a macro that sets up nearly everything you need for a brand new harvester. The one below will set all of your trusted friends as admins on the harvester (you could also use it to make sure that all of your alt accounts have access), then adds power and maintenance (the numbers below are only examples, you'll need to do the maths for your type and size of harvester yourself) and then names it:

  /setPerm Admin Reidi;
  /setPerm Admin Veeboo;
  /setPerm Admin Kesaah;
  /setPerm Admin Okiar;
  /addPower 12600;
  /paymaint 15120;
  /nameStructure  \#999999Eoj!\#ffffff "\#FF4040The Galaxy's Most Huggable Industrialist\#ffffff";