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.
Support
A question, a bug, an idea? Post it in the Discussion tab of this page, or use the form at https://z-ark.fr/en/plugin-support/ (no account needed). Please give the plugin version, your AsaApi version and what you saw. Z-ARK users can also write to us from Settings > Support in Z-ARK.
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.
