Text messages #

Featureful SDK supports the same means to show text as original Half-Life (env_message and game_text) along with some new methods and improvements.

Titles #

In vanilla Half-Life on Steam titles.txt expects to be either in ASCII or in ISO 8859-15 character encodings which limit the texts to English and other Western European languages. This is due to the text being rendered with a font that contains characters only from ISO 8859-15.

In WON versions of Half-Life the fonts for other 8-bit encodings could be provided via custom gfx.wad. This method doesn’t work anymore in Steam version.

In Featureful SDK titles.txt can contain UTF-8 text. This, however, makes the text to render with a console engine font which can’t be rendered in additive mode. Non-UTF texts are still rendered as usual.

While titles.txt is a decent way to handle texts in Half-Life, it suffers from some flaws like mixing of presentation and data (render properties and the text itself are defined in the same file which makes translations harder to sync with the original if it changes the presentation) and being “to close” to the engine.

Translatable messages #

Featureful SDK implements an additional way to handle texts, used by some subsystems (currently only by journal).

messages.en.json (located in the mod main directory) defines the mapping between message IDs and messages texts. Example:

{
    "HELLO": "Hello, world!",
    "QUESTION": "What are you on about?",
    "ANNOUNCEMENT": "Attention. This announcement system now under military command."
}

The “.en” part is because the default text is expected to be in English. The addon directories for localizations should contain messages.json file. If some translations are missing, the default one from messages.en.json will be used.

Let’s say you have a Russian localization messages.json file:

{
    "HELLO": "Привет, мир!",
    "QUESTION": "О чём это ты?"
}

As you can see, the "ANNOUNCEMENT" message ID is missing here, so the English version will be used in the absence.

This allows to add new message IDs without worrying about translations not having the new message, e.g. if you want to update the mod with new messages and third-party users already published their localizations - the users of such localizations will see new texts in English and it’s better than not seeing anything at all.

You can use messages.json for English texts as well, but then you lose the benefits the method above provides.

The message IDs are case-insensitive. I.e. hello and HELLO would refer to the same message.

The get_message console command is used to retrieve the message text for the provided id.

Subtitles #

See Subtitles.