Bigger News Window

This plugin allows the player to increase of the size of the news window to one of three predetermined larger sizes.  Additionally, there is an option for having DAMN menus displayed in the news window instead of in their own popup window.

INFORMATION:

The news window in SC4 is rather small, as one of Sim City 4's requirements was that it must run on monitors with resolutions as low as 800x600.  But these days, monitors running at those resolutions are rather rare.  Meanwhile, the current size news window can fill up very quickly.  This is especially true if you have a lot of custom content that generates news.  So you often have to scroll back and forth through the window just to see what's there.  Even worse, if you expand just a few items, the whole window size is taken.

To address this situation, bigger news windows have been created.  Specifically, there are now three larger sizes you can choose from.  Considering the current news window to be Small, the new sizes are Medium, Large, and Extra Large.  You pick one, but you can swap it out for either of the others (or just go back to Small) any time the game isn't running.  The default Small window is 228 pixels high; the Medium news window, shown above, doubles that to 456 pixels.  Of course, as you can tell, it's still possible to overflow this window with news, especially if you open some items.  So there is a Large size, which is 700 pixels tall.  Finally, for people with big monitors, there is the Extra Large size, which is 1000 pixels tall.

Although the Extra Large size just about fills the available space on a 1920x1200 screen,  it's still not too hard to fill it up, especially if you use it for DAMN menus.  If you have the Urgent Advice Dialogs option turned off, these menus automatically show up in the news window.  You can see how you can balance the amount of news you have with the size of your menus.  And then there's always scrolling, of course.  But a window this big allows you to much bigger DAMN menus without scrolling, and navigating through them is actually a bit faster than in the popup version of DAMN, since the window doesn't need to be recreated with every mouse click.  The one drawback of using DAMN menus in the news window is that the game must be in the stopped state for the menus to work properly.  However, this is generally a very minor drawback, as players usually want the game stopped at that point anyway, as they're about to plop something.

In addition to the three news window sizes, this plugin also contains a special version of customMenu.dat.  When installed, this file allows DAMN menus always to open in the news window, regardless of whether Urgent Advice Dialogs are turned on.