Mission dialog text - is there a style guide?
By
AlwaysAPrice,
Posted on: 2009-04-30 01:33 in Mission Architect
Easy method: go play some missions outside of the MA, take notes.
Non-obnoxious answer: ... uhm... I wouldn't mind knowing this too.
Knowing the way these things work (and the calls for editing/spellchecking etc. the old material), I bet their style guide is probably not 100% hard and fast.
There's significant variance in the coloring in the dev text, too.
indeed, a lot of times (most of the time?) the objective text is orange, so that's what I've been using. Been using Sky Blue for mission titles. That's about all the formatting I do except for flavor formatting, though, so don't know the rest.
I like the more recent style they have been using. Before they would only highlight the sentence that sums up the objective in a green. Now they highlight words within the story that make up the main elements of the plot with orange.
After all, not everybody wants to read that novel you've been writing. They want to kick butt. Try to get a sense of purpose to the butt kicking is the real fun in creative writing, for me.
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I use orange to highlight a single sentence in the briefing that sums up What You're Going To Do, and red when indicating timers or You Should Bring A Team, as those are the two customs that stayed in my head from whatever series of dev missions I'd last played before I started playing with the MA.
Standards I just kind of made up and ran with at the time and will probably carry over into other stuff: I use sky blue to highlight a mention of optional allies, and bold on a section inside of that to indicate Hey There's A Reason You Might Want This Ally. I color the arc title and mission names with a color I associate with the arc's subject matter. I use italicized light gray text instead of white as part of indicating you're not standing there talking to the contact but reaching them via phone for a few briefings.
It would probably help a bit if they put a little help in standardizing into the MA itself, adding to the right-click dropdown "Objective" and "Warning" separate from the color options, with those selections functioning to add the appropriate color tags. IIRC, the instructors in the AE buildings have some info on how to use color, forget if it includes those suggestions but I think it does.
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I use orange for AV or timer warnings, since I find the red hard to read, and it just screams "THIS IS NOT PART OF THE BRIEFING!!" to me, whereas I try to make the warnings in-character for the contact. Then I pick whatever color seems to me to best suit the arc for titles.
I'm not a big fan of the overuse of colored text in the latest dev-created content; those Midnight Club mission briefings look like my 6-year-old wrote them in crayon.
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I don't know how to change the text colors at all.
Is there a guide to doing that? Also the variables besides $name and when you can use them?
Dug, if you select the text you want colored and right click, it will bring up a list of colors and insert the HTML tags for you.
If I remember correctly, if you select a word in the middle of a bunch of text the tags will appear at the end, so you'll have to cut and paste them where you want them to be.
On the subject of the thread, though, I hate colored text for anything other than warnings about the mission. I find highlighted text to jar me out of story immersion and to be a distraction.
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To change the color you highlight the part you wish to change, right click, go down to color and pick the one you want.
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I know for print and presentations you are supposed to limit the use of color as an emphasis on words due to color blindness and i've been wondering if this has been an issue with any of the color formatting choices people are making in the MA?
thanks for the tip. My text is confusing enough, some color for emphasis might help
I wouldn't be surprised if that is what fueled the change from green highlighted to orange highlighted text, since I believe red/green color blindness is the most common type.
That said, I may be being overly generous, as the devs have still not fixed the colors for patrol xp, which my color blind husband cannot distinguish from the regular xp bar.
I couldn't remember all the color options the devs used, so I just made up my own. 
Royal Blue for the mission title, Sky Blue for Proper Names, Orange for Mission Objectives (and any Optional Objectives the contact might mention), Red for Items "given", or "taken from", the player. <_<
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[ QUOTE ]
If I remember correctly, if you select a word in the middle of a bunch of text the tags will appear at the end, so you'll have to cut and paste them where you want them to be.
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I think that's only how it works on these forums. I've never had trouble with colouring, italicizing or bolding text in situ in the MA creator window.
I'm trying to figure out the devs' style guide for mission dialog text.
Regular text is white because the window background is dark.
Mission titles are blue. (Are they also bold?)
Objectives/whole-sentence-requests/whole-sentence-commands are light green.
Character names are dark blue.
I remember seeing orange, yellow, and red being used, but at the moment I don't have any contacts that use them, so I can't remember the specifics. And what about bold text -- when is it used?