Set up the console

Reviewed

Six rows for opening, reading and keeping your console useful.

In the menus: ESC → SETUP → Console

Open the console

Press ~, or hold SHIFT and press ESC. Neither is a bind, so neither can be lost.

Console Bind adds a third key of your own. Select the row and press the key you want. It adds a key rather than replacing ~, which the game reaches before it reads your binds at all.

Console Height decides how far the panel drops.

  • Half Screen covers the top half.
  • Full Screen shows about twice as much of the scrollback at once, which is what you want for reading a long listing.

Change how it looks

Console Background offers Dark, Mid and Light. Dark is the default and suits the orange and white text StoryForce prints. Go lighter to read text somebody has coloured dark.

Console Opacity runs from 0.15 to 1 and starts at 0.8. Lower lets more of the scene through.

Hold CTRL and SHIFT, then use the mouse wheel with the console open to change the opacity in real time. SHIFT + mouse wheel walks through console history.

Copy console output

Drag over the text, then press Ctrl+C to copy it as plain text. On Mac, press Command+C.

Keep what you typed

Console History is off to start with. Tick it and lines you type are kept in storyforce_consolehistory.dat, so the up arrow still walks back through your commands after you restart the game. It holds the last 128 lines.

The file is rewritten each time you press Enter rather than on shutdown, so the last command before a crash survives.

Type the start of an old command before pressing Up or Down to walk only matching entries.

History excludes login, account and rcon commands, plus recognised password and service-token commands. It checks every semicolon-separated command.

Set the length of command lists

List Results Per Page sets how many rows paginated commands show at once. Choose 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25. It ships at 10.

Set sf_resultsperpage directly to use any value from 1 to 100. The server keeps it inside that range.

Prefer the console?

Three commands choose a background. Each also pushes your saved opacity into the engine as it goes:

/midmode and /lightmode are the other two, each printing the same line with its own name in it.

/colour draws the whole set of Jedi Academy colour codes on screen as a grid. It covers the number codes, the letter codes and, where the server allows them, hex colours. Type it again to clear it. color is an accepted alias, and neither spelling prints anything, because the grid is drawn over the world.

/colour

The settings behind the rows are cvars, game settings you can type into the console. Setting one prints nothing:

  • sf_conmode — Client-side. The console's background: 0 dark, 1 mid, 2 light. Ships at 0.
  • sf_conopacity — Client-side. How solid the console is, from 0.15 to 1. Ships at 0.8.
  • sf_fullscreenconsole — Client-side. 1 drops the console over the whole screen instead of the top half. Ships at 0.
  • sf_conHistory — Client-side. 1 keeps your typed commands between sessions. Ships at 0.
  • sf_resultsperpage — Saved locally and sent to the server. Rows per page, from 1 to 100. Ships at 10.