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About this mod
This mod will add the galactic average price as a suffix to the personal inventory items as well as the manufactured wares in the game. Want to see if the trader is ripping you off? Want to see at a single glance the best trades in the galaxy? Then this mod is for you. Check out the screenshots to see the exact visuals this changes.
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
To add a little more detail beyond the overview description:
This mod simply provides an "overlay" 0001-L044.xml file which will alter the English text for only the select lines that control the names of all Spacesuit Systems, Inventory Items, and Manufactured Wares in the galaxy. That's it. No code, no funny business, just some simple price suffixes added to the names of things.
The effect is you now always see the center reference price to determine if some price you're considering buying or selling something at is above or below the average price for that object. Combined with the map interface's displaying of trade sizes, you can quickly ballpark the true value of a potential trade beforehand. They're selling 1000 of an overstocked ware at what you can see now is priced at 200 credits below average? Seems pretty worthwhile to send a dedicated transport over to snarf up that 200000 savings! Or maybe you finally baked up some fresh Spacefly Caviar and want a good payoff for all the police you dodged? Well, unless you memorized the inventory screen value for it, would you know if 900000 is a good price or not? (That's not a good price.) Now you don't have to guess anymore. This goes for the common deployables, too, which vary from wharf to wharf or equipment dock. Stock up when you can see the Advanced Satellites are cheap!
There are further degrees this suffixing can be taken, too, which I am still working/thinking about. This is just my 1.00 release. Future areas I'm toying with is suffixing the most expensive station modules, so you can see at a glance whether it is worth failing out a repair mission to spacesuit scan for a blueprint chance, or go ahead and repair it and take the cash as offered. Also, I haven't gone through the slog of suffixing weapons, shields, thrusters, engines, and such. Yes, their prices can vary per wharf/equipment dock, but the reality is sometimes you just have to take what price is there just so you can get it built and not have to feed some station wares to get your order filled.
Building what this mod so far has was a fair bit of work, hunting down the prices in the tables, getting them laid in, testing to see if it made the name too long, etc. Truth be told, I built it just for myself, to solve the "at a glance" problem so I didn't have to make a paper cheat sheet of average prices. However, given the current season of the year, it seemed fitting to go ahead and release it for others to play with, and maybe enhance their enjoyment of the game just a little.
It's a crude gift (English only, just the raw file, used "$" as the cost delimiter which others may prefer their own country's currency symbol instead, etc.), but I hope it stimulates some interest and enjoyment. However, it's just a raw xml file, not locked in a CAT/DAT. Text edit it. Use the numeric page numbers and such as a guide to convert your own language preferences (e.g. use it as a template to make your own Deutsch 0001-L049.xml file, which wouldn't be that hard since I've already filled in the prices for you).
I give credit to Nywro, who released the "American English" mod here as the initial inspiration for this mod. Not the American or even the English part of their mod, but the fact that it reminded me that XML permits overlaying of data in a replacing kind of way. Yes, I see the fancy modders using <replace> commands for their stuff when they need to reach deep into specific field poking, but for simplicity's sake, I just did this as a copy/paste subset file instead of Nywro's entire replacement file or building it into custom <replace> commands. As a result, this mod should be nearly 100% compatible with all X4 versions for a very long time (tested minutes ago with 1.5), since it surgically only replaces the needed lines to suffix the names. It also means this mod is highly compatible with most other mods, unless someone actually needed to change these names for some other purpose (in which case we'd probably need to create some permutations of this to rectify those data collisions).
Given the proportional fonts used in both the galaxy map as well as the trader screen, I didn't hardly try to pad with spaces to make the prices simulate a column. I was just happy to have these suffixes show up at all. I did do a tiny bit of prefixing for the mod-based inventory items to group them together (value of 1 for them) as well as grouped the crystals together so they sort by increasing value. Otherwise, I tried to leave most things alone and not unduly mess with the names too much.
I'm eager to get back to playing now. Happy Holidays, and good profitss to you all.
This mod simply provides an "overlay" 0001-L044.xml file which will alter the English text for only the select lines that control the names of all Spacesuit Systems, Inventory Items, and Manufactured Wares in the galaxy. That's it. No code, no funny business, just some simple price suffixes added to the names of things.
The effect is you now always see the center reference price to determine if some price you're considering buying or selling something at is above or below the average price for that object. Combined with the map interface's displaying of trade sizes, you can quickly ballpark the true value of a potential trade beforehand. They're selling 1000 of an overstocked ware at what you can see now is priced at 200 credits below average? Seems pretty worthwhile to send a dedicated transport over to snarf up that 200000 savings! Or maybe you finally baked up some fresh Spacefly Caviar and want a good payoff for all the police you dodged? Well, unless you memorized the inventory screen value for it, would you know if 900000 is a good price or not? (That's not a good price.) Now you don't have to guess anymore. This goes for the common deployables, too, which vary from wharf to wharf or equipment dock. Stock up when you can see the Advanced Satellites are cheap!
There are further degrees this suffixing can be taken, too, which I am still working/thinking about. This is just my 1.00 release. Future areas I'm toying with is suffixing the most expensive station modules, so you can see at a glance whether it is worth failing out a repair mission to spacesuit scan for a blueprint chance, or go ahead and repair it and take the cash as offered. Also, I haven't gone through the slog of suffixing weapons, shields, thrusters, engines, and such. Yes, their prices can vary per wharf/equipment dock, but the reality is sometimes you just have to take what price is there just so you can get it built and not have to feed some station wares to get your order filled.
Building what this mod so far has was a fair bit of work, hunting down the prices in the tables, getting them laid in, testing to see if it made the name too long, etc. Truth be told, I built it just for myself, to solve the "at a glance" problem so I didn't have to make a paper cheat sheet of average prices. However, given the current season of the year, it seemed fitting to go ahead and release it for others to play with, and maybe enhance their enjoyment of the game just a little.
It's a crude gift (English only, just the raw file, used "$" as the cost delimiter which others may prefer their own country's currency symbol instead, etc.), but I hope it stimulates some interest and enjoyment. However, it's just a raw xml file, not locked in a CAT/DAT. Text edit it. Use the numeric page numbers and such as a guide to convert your own language preferences (e.g. use it as a template to make your own Deutsch 0001-L049.xml file, which wouldn't be that hard since I've already filled in the prices for you).
I give credit to Nywro, who released the "American English" mod here as the initial inspiration for this mod. Not the American or even the English part of their mod, but the fact that it reminded me that XML permits overlaying of data in a replacing kind of way. Yes, I see the fancy modders using <replace> commands for their stuff when they need to reach deep into specific field poking, but for simplicity's sake, I just did this as a copy/paste subset file instead of Nywro's entire replacement file or building it into custom <replace> commands. As a result, this mod should be nearly 100% compatible with all X4 versions for a very long time (tested minutes ago with 1.5), since it surgically only replaces the needed lines to suffix the names. It also means this mod is highly compatible with most other mods, unless someone actually needed to change these names for some other purpose (in which case we'd probably need to create some permutations of this to rectify those data collisions).
Given the proportional fonts used in both the galaxy map as well as the trader screen, I didn't hardly try to pad with spaces to make the prices simulate a column. I was just happy to have these suffixes show up at all. I did do a tiny bit of prefixing for the mod-based inventory items to group them together (value of 1 for them) as well as grouped the crystals together so they sort by increasing value. Otherwise, I tried to leave most things alone and not unduly mess with the names too much.
I'm eager to get back to playing now. Happy Holidays, and good profitss to you all.