Soft Messages
 -------------

    Many of what were compile time strings and ints have been replaced
   with a dynamic system that allows you to change those strings,
   without compiling, without evening rebooting.

    The files for these messages are found in soft/ and they all conform
   to a like format, which goes as follows...

   an identifer is the first word on a line, with a colon after it.

blah:

   the data for the identifer is put after the colon, you may use
   white space to delimit (in the files ive done so with a tab or
   two to make it all line up prettily)

blah:   This is the blah data

   The program does Not add on a newline when these are interpreted.

   To have multiple lines of data, begin the line directly
   afterwards with a tab, such as

blah:   This is blah data
        And this is as well

   (note, thats a tab directly before 'And')

   The newlines will be preserved in how the message is dealt
   with within the talker, as usual, however, there is no trailing
   newline added... if you want to get one without having to do
   it in the code, add a tab on a blankline after it, such as

blah:   This is blah data
        And this is as well
        

   (note, there is a tab at the beginning of that line)

   You can also put newlines at the beginning not putting anything
   on the inital data line, such as

blah:   
        This is blah data
        And this is as well


   Only lines whos first word is in the leftmost coloumn are parsed.
   For ease of use and familiarity, # are used at beginnings of lines
   to denote comments.   However, it is not suggested you try to use
   them on the same line as data.


   Thats all there is to the way the files are formated.


   On to the how the code handles it...
   In softmsg.c there are some highlevel functions for accessing
   the diffrent files in soft/  for a quick way to add new stuff,
   you can just put the identifer and data in one of the existant
   files, and call the matching function to access it...
   (check out plists.c for lotsa examples as to how this is done)

   Note, using that this, with auto reload, you can for instance
   change the login prompt and have it immedatly show on the
   running talker... in fact, this is the suggested way for you
   to get used to modifying things, cause in case of the login prompt,
   you cant hurt anything in the program, and you can see the results
   immedatly.
   
   
   And finally a few words on safety...

   In coding, if you add more dynatext tokens, they should Not Be
   Set Directly To Soft Messages... the best way to get something
   in dynatext is to use a global var, set it in set_config_flags()
   then access have the dynatext access the global var...
   This is so that you may properly embed dynatext in soft messages

   These files are in alot of cases treated as close to code as
   something can be without actually being it... so be very careful
   as to whut you change... (there are notes in the files as to
   where you must include various stuffs and other things)
   Make sure you have backups of these files in case something
   gets buggered or you manage to delete them... as they are
   highly required for the operation of your talker...
   (much the same way your main.rooms file is)

                                    ~phypor (6.15.98)