This is perhaps a strange question, but then it is about Strange Eons.

How does one change the colors of the numbers on the monster tokens?

That is, a Monster will have say a -1 modifier to combat checks (in Red) and a -2 modifier to horror checks (in Blue). If you wanted to have a monster who did the combat check first and the horror check afterwards, how could you go about switching the color of the checks from Red to Blue and Blue to Red.

I would prefer to not do it in fancy Java, I do all my stuff with text editting and picture renaming. This is because I don't know Java but I can photo shop.

-Frank

Why not just write it as the monster's special text that you have to pass the combat check before making the horror check? This would be a lot easier than attempting to change the cards.

If changing the cards is the way you want to do it, either you learn a little Java, or extract the graphical resources you need and put it together in Photoshop.

I want a class of monsters to be like this, and frankly I think it's really clumsy to do the right hand action and then the left. As for pulling the graphic rsources, I already did that, and it worked marvelously - for the damage icons. Unfortunately the numbers don't seem to be accessible in this format.

So while I've successfully swapped the location of the stamina and sanity damage icons, the combat and horror modifiers are still the same color. And it is now the wrong color.

Really what I think I need to know is where the special font for combat ad horror checks are stored. It's not obvious to me at all.

-Frank

Nevermind, I got it. The damage icons can be switched by renaming pictures, but you have to swap the locations on the card in "card-layout.txt" to swap the locations of the Horror and Combat modifiers.

-Frank

If you are just using this for your own group, it is all good and well to do it this way, but if you plan on allowing this to reach a wider audience I'd still put it as special text, otherwise most people would use the combat modifier & damage for the horror check and vice versa, or they will just read it from right to left if they notice the icons are different.

Frank said:

As you might have guessed, the modifiers are not images, but text, which explains why there are no image files to rename. (Although prior to SE2.00, they were images... which may account for your confusion.)

Anyway, your approach is the best way to go when what you really want to do is change the position of an element. (It would have been easier to swap the regions for the damage icons in card-layout.txt than to rename all the files, too!) If you actually wanted to change the colours, there are definitions for them in the same file. (I may have been lazy in a few places and used hard-coded values in a few components, but most of those have been updated by now. If you wanted to help differentiate them more, you could add a special rule name (as suggested above) or change one of the standard border colours and use that for this class of monsters.) Alternatively, you could use the colour correction feature if you wanted to do some really strange things to the colours.

To avoid confusion, I feel obligated to point out that:

1. While you could use Java, you probably meant JavaScript. These are two different languages (despite the similar names and a superficial syntactic similarity).

2. You don't really need to know any programming to write a script for changes like this. You can just copy the files from the tutorial or one of the examples in the plug-in authoring kit and change a few of the strings (bits of text in quotes). The critical difference is that instead of changing card-layout.txt directly, you put the changes inside the Patch.card( ... ) part of the script. The advantage of taking the couple of extra minutes needed to write an extension is that that different kinds of components (modified, original, modified in other ways) can all co-exist peacefully: you don't have to change directories and restart the program to work on something else, and the different components can be placed together in a single deck. It is also a lot easier to share what you are doing if you are working on a group project or want to make your source files available for others to use. Perhaps I should write "The Lazy Investigator's Customization Guide" at some point.

Cheers,
Chris

Honestly, in this case the class of monster is "every enemy in the Shadowrun Horror full port game." There's no "horror check" there's an "investigation" where you make a "discretion check" to avoid losing "ID" so naturally you make that roll after combat. The next thing I have to do is figure out how to parse the GOO cards so that they can be Threat Cards and not talk about "worshippers" and such.

-Frank

Frank said:

You seem to know the answer to that already: change the text in resources/text/{LANGUAGE}/card-text.txt to say something else. But perhaps you don't want to replace it with something else?

If you have a leftover text box or other object, you can get rid of it completely by changing the upper-left corner of its region to very large numbers so that the box is no longer on the token. To borrow from your original question, if you wanted to get rid of the horror modifier and damage bits completely you could change:

monster-horror-modifier-region = 15,134,30,28
monster-horror-damage-region = 9,164,43,34

to:

monster-horror-modifier-region = 10000,134,30,28
monster-horror-damage-region = 10000,164,43,34

which would move them about 1.7 meters off of the right edge of the token.

Finally, keep in mind that the best base card to use is not one that matches the purpose of the new card, but one that matches the available fields. Perhaps the Herald card would make a better basis for Threat Cards (you can always swap it to use the AO card template if that is the look you want, and you can create doom tracks by hand using mark-up if you have to---the AO editor already provides an example of how to do this).

Anyway, good luck.

Cheers,
Chris

Is there a method to creating new Outskirts style boxes?

Best thing I can think of is to create a new square template, and then make a new "token" and then put it onto the board. What dimensions should I use for that? And honestly, is there an easier way to do that?

-Frank

Frank said:

There is no editor for them in the version currently posted, if that is what you are asking. If you have your own artwork that you want to put on the board, you don't need to use a token. If it is a one-time thing, drag a "Custom Tile" onto the board, and double-click it to change the settings. If it is something you want to add to the tile lists, see the tile-map.txt file and/or extensions/example2 in the plug-in authoring kit .

Is there some way to keep the small circle and small oval tokens from flattening on the right and bottom sides? It seems like the progam is clipping the templates before the shapes actually end.

-Frank

Frank said:

For anyone who may have missed it in the other thread: short answer, yes. Long answer.