All about *.menu and their limits

[NumberWan]

Menus in JO and JA have been something rarely touched by modders. I myself experimented a lot with them and found them quite useful, as they can provide a lot in a mod for Single Player.

 

My question is - are there any limitations to the Menus in JA? We all know, JA has them regarding maps size or NPC count, vehicles, textures parameters, etc. Somehow these were solved by fans.

 

Is there anything regarding the menu file? Its contents perhaps?

 

The other question - is there a limit to how many *.menu files can be in game? Each screen menu is an independent *.menu file, which is also included in one of the txt files in UI folder of the game. For instance:

 

loadMenu { "ui/ingamesave.menu" }

loadMenu { "ui/ingameload.menu" }

loadMenu { "ui/ingamecontrols.menu" }

 

How many can I add to this list in the ingame.txt for instance?

 

Recently I've added quite a lot of new screens, and this resulted in one issue:

The game no longer shows the HUD. cg_draw2d 1 doesn't work. The only solution was to remove the menus from ingame.txt file, then HUD returns back.

 

The people, who worked with the source code, perhaps, you know of the issue? I mean, in the past you studied the code and found explanations for other problems. That helped a lot! Maybe here as well?

 

I placed this topic into the Coders section, but it might be better to move it to modding, depending on the nature of the problem.

[afi]

Yes there are limits for the amount of items in a menu and the amount of menu-files. I think the menuitem-limit is 512 and menus 128

[NumberWan]

@

Well, the amount of menu files is what concerns me the most. Too bad the way to solve that isn't an easy task...

[ensiform]

The 128 menu count was raised in OpenJK from 64 in jamp.  Its still 64 in OJK SP for the time being.

[NumberWan]

@@ensiform

Strange - I removed the MP menus. as I don't need them. It doesn't seem to have solved the problem (or is it essential to keep the same names for files, rather than making new ones?)

 

While looking into this issue, I came across LCARS. What are they exactly.

 

To be precise, the line in the console after certain manipulations with messages, printing in game, etc was like:

 

CG_LCARSText () veing called. Tell ste

String: ....

 

I do understand a few commands in the scripts can actually bring up the texts from the strings files to the screen. What does LCARS frame mean? I saw it was mentioned here. What kine of frame?

[ensiform]

Its from EF1 source code.

[NumberWan]

@@ensiform

Oh, so does it mean that it would work only in EF? In any case what does lcars mean?

 

I found an alternative to menus via using the print commands and message options with lines from strings though.

[Xycaleth]

Surprisingly, LCARS has its own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS

[NumberWan]

@@Xycaleth

   

believe it or not, I tried to find an article regarding lcars, but it often showed somehow anything you can imagine except for Star Trek stuff.

But in any case, that answers one of my questions.

 

I think, lcars is close to what I would like to make. And I actually did, the only problem is that the game has limitations to *.menu files.

[eezstreet]

In EF, it boots up with a little voiced message saying "Now loading LCARS menu system.."

If I remember right, there's only one mention of LCARS in the code outside of comments: cg.lcarsStage? It handles what message to display on the loading screen.

 

CG_LCARSText means you're trying to draw an untranslated string (aka it doesn't have a .str entry) or you've got a botched .str somewhere. I think? It's been a while- I just remember seeing this in regards to stuff with g_subtitles.

[therfiles]

Curiously, I think there is a limit to the amount of items contained within a .menu. I forget the exact number...maybe 300? I remember working on NpcSP and the game just refused to read anything past a certain point.

[eezstreet]

Curiously, I think there is a limit to the amount of items contained within a .menu. I forget the exact number...maybe 300? I remember working on NpcSP and the game just refused to read anything past a certain point.

It's most likely not an item limit that's being reached - I suspect the real limit is 512 or 256 - probably more likely to be a .menu file size limit, most likely in characters/bytes.

[NumberWan]

@eezstreet

The script suggests 3 variants for showing a printing of a message. At least one works fine, reading from a correspondent STRING file. So the problem is most likely, that LCARS are for trekkies, not Star Wars.

 

@therfiles

I suppose, there are. However this is not a problem for me, I was trying to add quite simple menus into my mod. If that's not possible due to limitations, I use as many as I can. while others are replaced with a script with set_print command. These can actually show quite a large portion of text.

 

The problem is that the script doesn't allow to allocate the text properly. I mean the layout. It is always centered, starting in the same place. You have to edit the string file to apply the lines properly. Another problem is that set_print is shown only for a few seconds, while I would rather see the text disappear when the Player wants.