This tutorial is intended to be the counterpart of the tutorial written for the WON version.

Customizing game strings

In the Steam version of GoldSrc as well as Source, game strings live in several files inside the game/mod folder:

• resource/GameUI_*.txt, containing game UI strings
• resource/<modfoldername>_*.txt, containing in-game strings (partly superseding titles.txt)

These files are considerably easier to customize compared to its WON predecessor, and supports internationalization into different languages.

To customize them, make a copy from valve/resource folder into your mod's equivalent, and change as necessary. Be sure to preserve all the curly braces in the files or else it'll fail to parse!

See also: titles.txt for modifying in-game strings.

Where these strings are used

One instance is in the list of available keybinds, as it appears in the Keyboard tab of the Options dialog, available in gfx/shell/kb_act.lst. Opening the one from valve folder, you'll see something like this:

"blank"            "=========================="
"blank"            "#Valve_Movement_Title"
"blank"            "=========================="
"+forward"        "#Valve_Move_Forward"
"+back"            "#Valve_Move_Back"
"+left"            "#Valve_Turn_Left"
"+right"        "#Valve_Turn_Right"
"+moveleft"        "#Valve_Move_Left"
"+moveright"    "#Valve_Move_Right"

The first string on each line is the console command that would be associated with a key, and the second is the string displayed in the UI list. Here you can see the Steam UI string system at work; instead of a literal string, the value is instead a "#" sign followed by a string token ID. This token ID would be the same one found in the files covered in the previous section. In-game, the appropriate strings from the resource files will be filled in (except when the token is missing, of course.) Other places where you can use UI tokens instead of literal strings include:

• All the VGUI resource files (resource/*.res)
• The server/user CVAR options (Options > Multiplayer > Advanced and Create Server > Advanced pages) defined in user.scr and settings.scr.

Notes

• There is no equivalent to the Making a console background and a loading screen section in the WON version of the tutorial. The drop-down console has been replaced with a console window. The loading screen has been replaced with a simple loading dialog.
  • Actually, there is resource/BackgroundLoadingLayout.txt but it is seldom utilized, usually being the exact same as resource/BackgroundLayout.txt.