Action 4

Define vehicle names or other texts


When making new vehicle graphics, you also need to name the new vehicles, or they'll show up with their original name from TTD.

In addition, you can change most of TTD's text strings.

Note that changes of vehicles names can be overridden by using TTD's vehicle.dat custom vehicle names. There is no way to bypass the custom vehicle names, other than turning them off or deleting vehicle.dat.


The data looks as follows:

Element	Size	Description
<Sprite-number>	dec	A sequential sprite number
<length>	dec	The total number of bytes used in this action.
04	B	Defines action 04
<feature>	B	For what type of vehicle/station should this definition be used?
<language-id>	B	Which of TTD's languages this name is for
<num-ent>	B	Number of consecutive strings to change
<offset>	B/W	First ID to change
<text>	S	New text strings

Whether <offset> is a BYTE or a WORD is decided by bit 7 of <language-id>, see below.

Sprite-number

This is just the number you are at.

Length

Count the number of bytes in this action.

feature

This sets the type of feature that you wish to change. Set it to:

00 for trains
01 for road vehicles
02 for ships
03 for planes
04 for stations
05 for canals
06 for bridges
07 for houses
0A for industries
0B for cargos
48 for original strings; see TextIDs for a list of TTD's text IDs.

language-id

The meaning of this byte depends on the GRF version of the .grf file as set in action 8.

Up to version 6, this is a bit mask of the following bits:

Bit	Value	Meaning
0	01	American or "other"
1	02	English
2	04	German
3	08	French
4	10	Spanish
7	80	Flag for 16 bit string IDs

Add the bits of all languages for which the following strings apply. Bit 7 controls, whether the following string ID consists of 16 or 8 bit. Since TTDPatch now supports languages other than the standard ones, unknown languages will use the American strings as fallback. Otherwise the string would remain undefined for these languages. To actually define strings for any new language, you must use grf version 7.

For version 7 and higher, it is a simple language ID from the list below. (This has changed with 2.5 beta 4). Bit 7 has the same meaning as in the earlier versions above.

In either scheme, you can use the value 7F or FF, respectively, to define strings shown for languages that you do not provide translation for. First set all strings to a default value using this, and later override the language specific ones if they exist.

Currently, the scheme is to use international phone codes as language IDs, unless they're out of range, in which case pick a number vaguely related in some way. Or something else.

ID (hex)	Language
00	American
01	English
02	German
03	French
04	Spanish
05	Esperanto
06	Ido
07	Russian
08	Irish
09	Maltese
0A	Tamil
0B	Chuvash
0C	Chinese (Traditional)
0D	Serbian
0E	Norwegian (Nynorsk)
0F	Welsh
10	Belarusian
11	Marathi
14	Arabic (Egypt)
15	Czech
16	Slovak
18	Bulgarian
1B	Afrikaans
1E	Greek
1F	Dutch
21	Basque
22	Catalan
23	Luxembourgish
24	Hungarian
26	Macedonian
27	Italian
28	Romanian
29	Icelandic
2A	Latvian
2B	Lithuanian
2C	Slovenian
2D	Danish
2E	Swedish
2F	Norwegian (Bokmal)
30	Polish
31	Galician
32	Frisian
33	Ukrainian
34	Estonian
35	Finnish
36	Portuguese
37	Brazilian Portuguese
38	Croatian
39	Japanese
3A	Korean
3C	Malay
3E	Turkish
42	Thai
54	Vietnamese
56	Chinese (Simplified)
5A	Indonesian
5C	Urdu
61	Hebrew
62	Persian
80	Flag 16 bit string IDs (added to language ID)
7F	any (will be applied no matter what language is active)

When translating for a new language, please simply edit this document and add the new definition here.

num-ent

How many consecutive entries to change.

offset

The ID of the first string to change.
When language-id bit 7 is clear, this is a byte value; except for OpenTTD since r13482, where it is an extended byte value for vehicles.
When language-id bit 7 is set, this is a word value in little endian notation, e.g. 8134 becomes 34 81.

The 8 bit version is only allowed for vehicles to set their name, in which case the text ID is just the vehicle ID.

To replace original texts, or to define texts for usage in callbacks or properties of vehicles, stations, houses or industries you have to use the 16 bit version. However, town names are changed with Action F.
For the usable 16 bit text IDs see the table below, resp. for feature 48 see TextIDs.

Though these ranges are shared across all features, you should still set the proper feature you are using them for.

ID	Content
C4xx	Set name of station class associated with station ID xx; this is the text above the preview (where otherwise TTD shows "Orientation")
C5xx	New station names, this changes the text "number of platforms" into the given text when the station with this ID from the current set is selected (i.e. xx=station-id from action 3 and 0)
C9xx	Name of the house type of this ID. If both property 12 and this is set, the latest definition is used always. You should prefer setting property 12 instead of this, so executables translated with TTD Translator will show the name in the current language. However, if you can't find any suitable old TTD texts, this can be used to specify your custom name. Don't forget to set the same text for all parts of a multi-tile building.
D0xx	Miscellaneous graphics texts, unique to each .grf file. Used for newobjects and several callbacks. Some callbacks as well as newobjects support IDs up to D3FF.
D4xx	Never use in Action4, only for displaying textids in range D000-D3FF? (grf specific), see TextIDs
D8xx	Never use in Action4, only usable in Action0 features, see TextIDs
DCxx	Set miscellaneous persistent GRF texts. Unlike the D0xx GRF texts, these IDs can be used to set properties. The text ID must be set before any action 0 references it.

The DCxx IDs are allocated internally when defined, and are persistent in the savegame data. Each .grf file gets its own separate map of these internal IDs and thus may set all 256 of them. However, only 1024 IDs are available in total, to be shared by all .grf files ever activated in the savegame. This means these IDs should be used as sparingly as possible. But use them when they are useful!

text

This is a list of zero-terminated strings, there must be as many strings as num-ent specifies.

You can use the str2hex converter to generate the proper hex values.
Alternatively, use grfcodec version 0.9.6 or later, which accepts literal strings in the .nfo. These are encoded exactly as written, in whatever encoding your text editor uses; if you need a 00, put it immediately after the literal string.
For the supported encodings, format, and restrictions on what characters you may use, please see GRFActionsDetailed and StringCodes.


A large number of original TTD strings require a colour code in front of the actual string. You can also use these colour codes in most of your custom strings. Use them wisely! In case a string requires a colour code, the string will have the code displayed in front of the default text as listed in TextIDs.Typically, a colour coded string starts with the escape character (backslash), followed by hex byte and then the actual text string itself. I.e. string 0001 ("\94Off edge of map") has colour code 0x94 in front of the text string, which will colour it white. You can also put the plain hex byte outside the quoted string without having to escape it. 94 "Off edge of map" would be the same as "\94Off edge of map"

The following 16 colour codes are available for use:

Code	Colour
88	Blue
89	Light Grey
8A	Yellow
8B	Red
8C	Light Purple
8D	Beige
8E	Light Orange
90	Light Yellow
91	Light Green
92	Light Pink
93	Brown
94	White
95	Light Blue
96	Grey
97	Purple
98	Black

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