Console Text Colour

yahwho · Jan 30th 2024

Hi, so this isn't anything major, and it's more for server-side aesthetics and ease of viewing live console output from various plugins (particularly during the debug phase).

Does anyone know a way - in Windows - (so ANSI escape codes won't work) to change the colour of the outputted System.out.println() ?

I'm hacking it a little at the moment using the System.err.println() to print console output as red for certain print statements. 🙉🙈🙊

But ideally I would like to use something syntactically like;

Code

System.out.println(ConsoleColors.RED + "RED COLORED" + ConsoleColors.RESET + " NORMAL");

I do notice that when the server starts up there is yellow text from the server ... (also looks like an err print with the time)

So clearly the console supports colour.

I've Google'd for this in the past, but never found an answer...

I even thought I could extend the PrintStream class and override the println ... but nope doesn't really help unless I find a solution and want to make it cleaner.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase…java/lang/System.html#out

Any ideas guys?

yahwho · Jan 30th 2024

In mean it's 2024 not 1998

paulevs · Jan 30th 2024

That depends on what console you are using. Looks like RW uses custom console for game logging, and in-game menu uses something similar to Unity console. There is a way to colorize messages, at least there is a part of API for that, so you can try this for color output.

Windows console itself don't properly support colors, and in different windows versions that support is also different. That's why most games uses custom consoles for their debug, and these consoles can have or not have color text depending on specific realization.

yahwho · Jan 30th 2024

Hi Paulevs, the console is a Windows command prompt/cmd you can right click on the Windows title bar and change the settings there. I.e. see that it is in fact a Command window.

I really hate using the in game chat for debug messages...

Maybe my solution will be to launch my own jframe console and push my console output to that instead. 🤔

noci · Jan 30th 2024

I've already been searching like crazy, but it all comes down to the color being done at that point in C#

Only gives red when System.err.print

yahwho · Jan 31st 2024

Yeah, it was just the yellow forbidden item colour that gave me hope...

yahwho · Jan 31st 2024

By the way, noci I love the moving chest

Ludy · Jan 31st 2024

thank you very much i made the mimic (the chest) and also designed the movements for it

but that she can do it all in RW that's what noci did

james1bow · Feb 1st 2024

i tried messing with this but never got anything working.

https://stackoverflow.com/ques…-using-system-out-println

yahwho · Feb 1st 2024

Yep that only works in Linux AFAIK.

I'm going to write my own output console - with colour!

red51 · Feb 3rd 2024

I'm afraid this is difficult to achieve through the Plugin API The game creates the console window manually through the Windows API (AllocConsole or AttachConsole if a console window already exists). You could try to create a wrapper for the Windows APIs and write text (with colors) that way, but that's probably overkill (and IDK if this interferes with the game)...

Right now the only way is the use System.out.println() for regular output or System.err.println() for red output. Having said that, we could maybe add a method to the Internals class which allows you to log a message to console with an arbitrary foreground/background color (unfortunately that won't make it into the update anymore)

yahwho · Feb 3rd 2024

Quote from red51

we could maybe add a method to the Internals class which allows you to log a message to console with an arbitrary foreground/background color

That would be really helpful.

red51 · Feb 27th 2024

It turned out that the Windows console is a bit more limited that expected It doesn't support arbitrary colors, instead you can only select a few pre-defined colors. The last hotfix has added the new Internals.println() method which accepts a color ID. Not a perfect solution, but better than nothing

We may change this method in the future, so I'd recommend to create a new function which wraps the internal function

yahwho · Feb 27th 2024

This is brilliant! Thanks!

It's mainly for being able to read the console output easier.

For example, I have some producer-consumer code, and having one one, colour and the other another is really useful from a sanity point of view.

Participate now!