How to: clean up the navbar

Ever wanted a really nice and clean-looking navbar which is easy to read and pleasing for the eye?

I've just discovered that you can use line-breaks in the objective text fields. Of course, putting a line-break after the text will make the automatically added comma end up on the next line, which doesn't look very nice.

If the line-break is added in front of the text, however, everything will look perfect.

Write your objective text like this:

"<br>Your text goes here"
"<br>The next objective"
"<br>The final objective"

This will show up in the navbar thus:

Nice. Thanks for the tip.

Except a navbar should look like this:

computer, 3 crate., Baddy
Mc Badpants, Dark darkity
Darkness, Haxxorz, Rouge
Angle of Satin., Baron von Evil,
Hapless citizen.

For what it's worth, this does not work in dialog (in case no one knew that already). I tried to have an ally you rescue "say two things" and it looked like this

"Help! <BR>Please someone help me!"

instead of this

"Help!"
"Please someone help me!"

with two word balloons.

Nice find.

Very nice catch, Fred. My only concern: Is this "by design"? If it's something that will be corrected later on, I might want to leave my existing mishes alone for fear of having to edit them later from the feedback hatemail about it.

@TURGENEV - Freedom Server / IRON / B.A.N.E / HORDE

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I'm pretty sure it's working as intended.


One slight problem with this trick that I forgot to mention. If you have an objective with a "plural" text, it won't work to put the "<br>" at the front of that line, because then the automatically added number will end up on the row above the text. But I'm sure everyone figured that out already.

Yep, you cannot put line breaks in NPC dialog.

Also, the character limit for Boss Unaware dialog is greater than what will be displayed in a word bubble. The entire thing will show up in the NPC Dialog channel but the word bubble will cut it off.

This is a very useful piece of AE info that deserves bumping.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FredrikSvanberg One slight problem with this trick that I forgot to mention. If you have an objective with a "plural" text, it won't work to put the "<br>" at the front of that line, because then the automatically added number will end up on the row above the text. But I'm sure everyone figured that out already.

Yeah, plural text is quite the annoyance. You can stick the <BR> at the end but unfortunately it puts the comma on the next line.

I just found out about this trick, although some people probably knew about it from a long time ago...

You can combine different objective details in the navbar by using the same Plural Text in each of the details. This way instead of having:

Find the Scanner, Find the crate, Find the GlowyBall, Find the ...

You can cut it down to:

X Objects of Interest to Find

If you insert "Objects of Interest to Find" in the Plural Nav Text field of each of the individual details. The MA will batch them together in the Navbar. This is probably best when you are trying to obscure the kinds of things being looked for (as in a mystery arc) or that there are several details that use identical objects/models but yield different clues or text (such as file cabinets, computers, etc).

Note that the "combine objectives" trick works even if the objectives are different: such as having a boss, an escort, a captive and a bodybag collection for the 'X scientists to find' objective combo. You can even combine required and optional objectives in this manner. One thing to look out for is that you will NOT get the proper singular objective description for the last objective (ie. if the last scientist is the captive, you will probably have the boss' objective text show up instead), so you need to keep it generic for the single objectives as well, such as "Find the last scientist".

Another related not-so-obvious "trick": if you don't specify a Plural / Singular nav bar text for an *optional* objective (the 'Required' field must not be checked!), it will not appear on the nav bar. This is useful in case you want to set up your spawns manually, want to have 'flavor' or 'decoy' glowies in a mission, want optional 'minibosses' to not show up in the nav bar at all, etcetera.


-- Z.