Z-Messages — welcome, announcements and our plugins' messages, styled your way
Demo
A welcome message, recurring announcements, and one style sheet that decides how our plugins' messages look: colour, sender name, chat or top of the screen. No more "(SERVER):" glued in front of their lines. Messages that the game or other tools send on their own (Z-ARK's restart warnings, for example) keep their usual look.
Install
Drop the
Z-Messages folder into ShooterGame/Binaries/Win64/ArkApi/Plugins/. Requires AsaApi 2.03+. Loads at server start. config.json is re-read every minute, or at once with ZMessages.Reload: no restart needed.Features
- Welcome — a message to each arriving player, after their character has loaded (
DelaySeconds,MaxWaitSeconds).{player}becomes their name. Off by default: enable it only if no other plugin already greets players. - AutoMessages — announcements to everyone, one per round, in turn, every
IntervalMinutes. Off by default. - Style — the default look of all messages:
Color[R, G, B],Sender(put your community name),TopOfScreen(chat or big text at the top),DurationSeconds,Scale,TopOfScreenCharsPerLine. (Boldis still read but has no effect: ARK's chat has no bold.) - Per-message style — write a message as an object and set only what changes:
{ "Text": "Reboot in 10 minutes", "Color": [255,60,40], "TopOfScreen": true }. APaneloption shows a titled window the player has to close — keep it for warnings. - Styles — a style sheet by intent:
info,succes,alerte,urgent,discret(add your own). Our other plugins (Z-Points, Z-Colour, Z-Info, Z-Chat, Z-Rcon...) only name the intent; you decide here what it looks like, for all of them. - Formatting — named colours, exact shades, emotes and images inside a message. See
FORMATTING-EN.txt(also FR, DE, ES) in this folder, including what the game cannot do. - For our other plugins — they send their messages through Z-Messages when it is installed. If it is absent, they fall back to the game's ordinary message: nothing breaks, it is just plainer.
Configure (config.json)
General.Enabled—falseputs the plugin to sleep.General.Language— picks the block ofTexts(the default sender name: Server, Serveur, Servidor...).Style,Styles,Welcome,AutoMessages— see above; every block has a_line and_helpat the bottom explains each key.Welcome.TextIfNotLinked/Welcome.LinkedAccounts— an optional sentence added only for players missing from the list (for example an invitation to link a Discord account; the list can be maintained by an external tool such as Z-ARK).
RCON commands
ZMessages.Reload— re-reads config.json.ZMessages.Status— version and state.
Compatibility
Built and tested against AsaApi 2.03 (ARK: Survival Ascended dedicated server, Windows).
External connections and data
- No network connection. The plugin opens no connection of its own and sends nothing anywhere: no web request, no telemetry, no licence check, no update check.
- Files written: its own
config.jsononly, rewritten only to rename setting names of older versions (values kept). - Data kept:
Welcome.LinkedAccounts, a list of EOS ids that you, or an external tool such as Z-ARK, keep inconfig.json; Z-Messages only reads it. - Images and emotes in messages are the game's own assets, never web addresses.
- It exports functions that our other plugins call to send their messages, inside the server process.
- No registry access, no external program started, no other data collected.
Dependencies and limitations
- No required dependency. Required by Z-Chat; used by our other plugins when it is installed.
- Two game hooks: a player's arrival (for the welcome message) and departure.
- ARK's chat has no bold; what else the game cannot display is listed in
FORMATTING-EN.txt. - Messages that the game or other tools send on their own keep their usual look.
Updates
Z-ARK (server manager, https://z-ark.fr/en/) checks for new versions of this plugin and installs them from its dashboard.
Without Z-ARK: click Watch at the top of this page to be notified of every new version; what changed is listed in the Updates tab. To update, stop the server, replace the plugin's .dll and PluginInfo.json, keep your config.json, then start the server again.
Built with AI, knowingly
This plugin was written with an artificial intelligence, and we would rather say it plainly. It is not code thrown together at random: behind it is someone from the trade (software development, server operations, community management) who decides every feature, reviews it and puts it to the test on a real cluster, with real players, before it reaches you. The same goes for the ZMenu client mod. Bugs reported in the Discussion tab get fixed.
