Balloon Story Addon

If you want to use the images or anything from the one I uploaded please feel free.

Great job!

I'm the author of the Invtracker and Giltracker addons. I started making a similar addon to this one back in 2018. I never shared it because I stopped playing before I could flesh it out. Now, four years later, I came back during the free login period, used BallonBlue and loved it.

During this period I figured I might as well finish mine, and I took a couple of fixes from this one. This one works a little different and has different features, for anyone who is interested in trying a different flavor.

Some of the features I have are:
- Can choose different themes based on the vanilla FFXI window boxes.
- There's two types of message boxes. Regular messages stay on the screen until you press enter. Timed messages have a configurable duration and show a timer in the lower right corner. Multiple timed messages won't override each other, instead they will buffer and show in a single box.
- Has a little animated arrow at the bottom right to let the user know there's a prompt waiting.
- Supports more characters (I think?).

I couldn't take any screenshots after the free period ended, sorry. I might reactivate my account though, since I got hooked to the game again.

It's called npcbox, and you can grab it from this forked repo:

https://github.com/azamorapl/windower-lua/tree/personal/addons/npcbox

Nice! My fork does already have a little bouncing arrow when you need to press enter, and an indicator for timed messages is on my list of things to add (probably the next thing I'm going to do). A buffer of them is a really good idea though, I hope you don't mind if I recreate that feature!

I've been adding missing character replacements as I come across them in-game, so very possible you have more support there.

Sure! Take all you need from mine. I think I'm still missing a few characters, though. Back in 2018 I wrote "TODO áéíóú" and "TODO elemental symbols", but I don't remember if they were random ideas or if I bumped into a cutscene that needed them.

ver 0.12 9/6/22 Animated Text Display & Countdown Timer.
https://github.com/StarlitGhost/Balloon/releases/tag/v0.12

Another update!

Animated text display:

You can adjust the speed of this with //bl text_speed <characters> - it's the number of characters per frame to reveal.
This is with 10 at 60fps, set it to something like 1000 if you want to make it instant like before.

Countdown timer:

This is for messages without prompts, it shows you how long is left till they disappear.
You can set that with //bl delay <seconds>
I based the countdown display code on Aelmar's, thanks for sharing!

I also made theme switching a little better, it will now re-process the text with the theme's MaxLength and animate the text display again.
This also makes it easier to see what you're doing when creating/editing themes.

I dunno how much people dig into multi-page threads here, but I'm thinking of making my own so I can put the latest updates to my fork in the OP - does that seem good?

ver 0.13 13/6/22 Character Portraits.
https://github.com/StarlitGhost/Balloon/releases/tag/v0.13

This one's kinda big. I made character portraits for 154 of the main story NPCs, and set up the FFXI, FFVII-R, and default/FFXIV themes to use them, each in slightly different ways.





You can toggle these on/off with //bl portrait, and the default theme has a different text layout without them:

That also applies for characters that don't have portraits!

Themes have to have a <Portrait> settings block in their theme.xml for portraits to be displayed.

Themes can also have their own sets of portraits, if you want to have some in a different style for example. Those would go under themes/<theme name>/portraits/

The SNES-FF theme currently doesn't support these, but I may make a pack of pixellated portraits specifically for that theme! If I can figure out a good automated filter to create them all, anyways.

I've written up how I created the portraits with AltanaView and ImageMagick, if you're interested in making some yourself: Portrait Creation
You could also do it in-game using a reshade greenscreen shader, which would probably be easier as you come across NPCs while playing.

Writing up that guide reminded me, I still need to write one for theme creation - those theme.xml files are getting dense!

Anyways, I hope you enjoy!

https://github.com/StarlitGhost/Balloon/releases/tag/v0.13

Thats crazy. Thanks for this.

This is absolutely great ! Thank you so much for this.

Hi,

Thought I'd post here to say I made an Ashita v4 port of this addon, you can find it on my Github here: https://github.com/onimitch/ffxi-balloon-ashitav4

I don't usually browse these forums so if you find any issues it's best to post on GitHub or visit the Ashita Discord.

i can not let it load The SNES theme it not working
//balloon load theme <themes> Snes? or
//balloon load theme <snes>