Star Wars Galaxies: Tuesday Tip: Keeping In-Game Notes

Falacy: For those that do not already know, typing /note on the Star Wars Galaxies command line opens up an ingame notepad file, which is stored in (generally):

C:Program FilesStarWarsGalaxiesprofilesyour_station_namenotes.txt

This is really handy, because you can fill it with useful information, like your pricing schemes, loot tables, personal journal, reminders, a table of the parts you have in all of your ships, the entire list of Chu Gon Dar combinations, etc. However, sticking all of this into one file, notes.txt, is hard to organise and eventually, is plain not possible due to memory limitations.

I have a fix - and... it's simple!

/note filename

All SOE needs to do is make the /note command accept an argument that opens up a new notepad of the argument name, in this case filename!

In terms of ease to impliment this idea, it would take me about 3 minutes to change a linux shell script to do this if it originally had the /note functionality, so I imagine it wouldn't take an uber programer at SOE more than half an hour to figure this one out in thier wierd SWG engine code.

What benefit will this have for SWG players?

Imagine not having to visit an external forum (where all your favorite stuff may be deleted) to get guides, etc. Infact, imagine being able to type /note dwb to get a full guide to the Death Watch Bunker up on your ingame instantly! Also, imagine that these files will be stored on your computer, so there will never be any lag and if you want to update them, you can so without even having to be playing the game or logged into the forum or even connected to the internet!

Imagine if we all shared our help files too... finally, an ingame "holocron" worth reading!

DevH: This is done. Look for it in the bugbash update. And no, I don't know when the bugbash update is going to hit TC Prime.

Falacy: O_o I was just wondering about this idea this weekend. Will typing /no still give you your default notepad?

DevH: /notepad without anything will behave like it does now on live, which is to toggle the display of the notepad window. When you first launch your client, the default notepad file will be notes.txt, which is the notepad file that is used for live right now. You can now change the file by /notepad <filename>, and it will remain <filemane> until you change it again with /notepad [another filemane]. It will revert back to notes.txt the next time you start your client, but you can easily override that with /notepad <filename>. .txt will be automatically appended to the <filename> that you enter. The title bar of the /notepad window now displays the name of the file currently being edited, so there should never be any confusion over what file you are currently editing.

DevH: This little tidbit of information is for the advanced user who want to organize all their notes files into multiple folders.

The default location of the notes.txt file is profiles[account name]notes.txt (under the SWG installation directory). When you do /notepad <filename>, that file will be in profiles[account name]<filename>.txt, like if you do "/notepad weapons_info", that file will be in profiles[account name]weapons_info.txt. This is the basic stuff, and most player will just stick with this.

Now, for the advanced stuff. <filename> can actually contain folders and subfolders that you have already created under the profiles[account name] folder. For example, if you have already created the folders/subfolders profiles[account name]weaponscommando, and you do "/notepad weaponscommandoflamethrower_info", that note file will be in profiles[account name]weaponscommandoflamethrower_info.txt. You can user either (back slash) or / (forward slash) and it will work, so "/notepad weapons/commando/flamethrower_info" will also work. *BE WARNED* though that the /notepad code does *NOT* verify to make sure it can write to the file you specify, so if you specify a folder that doesn't exist, and /notepad cannot write to the file, you will lose your notes when you change /notepad file, or when you exit the client. *YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED* Only use this feature if you are absolutely sure all folders/subfolders exist. I recommend a quick sanity check by typing in some short note, and then /notepad another file, and then /notepad the file to see if it reloaded the short note you entered, and if it did, then you know it successfully wrote to the file, and if it didn't, it couldn't write to the file. If you are sure that you have a non-empty file in a folder/subfolder and when you /notepad it, it shows a blank /notepad window, it means /notepad couldn't open the file, so check for typos of the folder/subfolder/file name.

ordio: Interesting... Couldn't you just add a little extra code so that you can check for the existance of the folder, and if it doesn't exist, create it?

I know i had to do that in several programs i write in VB (although i'm sure its different with the ingame notepad)... and i just have one generic call program to do it all...

Just curious on this... glad you were able to do this at all!! Thanks!

DevH: It possible to write more code to do more, but I didn't want this thing to become a huge time sink. I don't know if DM/Blix would want any more time spent on it, considering there are other things to work on that has a more direct gameplay impact. The folder/subfolder behavior was just something that you get for free with the file management API, so I thought I'd mention it for those who want to take advantage of it. I didn't spend any time making it work with folder/subfolder, and it would take more time to write enforcement code to *not* let you specify folder/subfolder.