Dealing with long company names

[RulerofRails]

So, after finally getting my head around how to setup track events in SCBC so that hopefully you can't end up "in the cold" no matter how off-script you go, I turned my attention to fixing a little of the spelling/grammar. some SCBC company names are very long. As far as I can tell, two have mistakes: "Boundry Creek Milling&Lumber Company", and "Kooteney Fruit Growers Association". "Boundary Creek" and "Kootenay" are correct according to google.

Now there's a catch. I can enter a 38 character name when starting a company. But when I go to edit the names (I control right chairman) via "change" under the company logo in the editor I can only enter 30 characters in this space. This is in 1.05. These names I want to correct are over 30 characters.

I'm sort of hoping someone might have an idea if there is another way. I realize that using hex editor will probably work, but hoping a little that I don't have to go that far.

[Gumboots]

No idea, but honestly the sanest option is probably to just abbreviate the long names to something sensible. I can't see that degrading gameplay at all.

I'd try "Boundary Creek Lumber Company", and "Kootenay Fruit Growers".

[RulerofRails]

Thanks for the ideas. I was able (or maybe foolish enough?) to correct the names in hex editor. Was easier to find them than I thought. All the company names are pretty long, if I start cutting on one or two I'll want to do them all. There are others like "British Columbia Prospecting Syndicate" or "Le Roi Mining and Smelting Company."

I also scared myself a little when I moved one event down a couple places. This messed with the order the game checked a bunch of other events. Thankfully, moving it back fixed the issues. I forget, is there a warning for that somewhere?

[RulerofRails]

In case no one was wondering, I ran into similar again. Briefing text can be very long. SCBC has almost 1,400 characters for the initial briefing text. But in an event box I can only put 806 of them so I can't reset the briefing text at appropriate times during the game.

[Gumboots]

So prune it down.

[RulerofRails]

Realized that it's probably not possible to do a reset of this without showing it to the player, so I put one reminder about the Gold requirements later in the game which will also serve as the "new" briefing.

[Gumboots]

Not sure what you mean. Can't you do multiple briefings, with the text for one having no relation to the text for another? I've never used it, but I'm pretty sure the editor allows it. I'm not sure why a long first briefing would affect later ones.

[RulerofRails]

The logistics are that any event text can become the new briefing, but being an event text it will show up for the player during the game. I did try to be sneaky and set it for the AI, also as a message or newspaper but it still showed up in-game.

Assuming there were no length problems, I could probably slip in a "copy" of the proper briefing text at year end without too many eyebrows being raised (could do same with a trimmed version). But someone might think it's a bug.

I ended up writing a "reminder" for the Gold medal since Silver and Bronze are concerned with the connections and during the connections the route descriptions fit nicely. I'm happy with it for now. But open to suggestions.

[Gumboots]

You've lost me. Why would you not want a new briefing to show up in the game? That's the whole point of a briefing. It can't brief you on the situation if it doesn't show up.

[RulerofRails]

Ok. I think I am arguing a mute point. I started out with the ill-conceived idea to completely reset the briefing (use the identical one as at the start of the game). What I am trying to say is that I realized that later in the game it made sense to use an updated one (not identical) which can then be of some interest for the player as well. Which was probably obvious to you from the beginning, sorry.