Can't get readme to show up ingame

[Andrew350]

I've searched all over, and the little bit of info I can find seems to indicate that I can simply write a plain text file called readme.txt, bundle it in a .tar file with a grf, and it will automatically show up ingame with the nifty little 'view readme' button. Obviously this is not how it works however, since that is not working. What is the magic step that I'm missing here? I can't find anything explaining it.

Thanks in advance, this is starting to drive me nuts

[Alberth]

I am not aware of any magic steps

Did you look at what's inside any tar file that works?
Perhaps that gives some clues what you do different.

Edit: Perhaps having a directory in the tar???

[Eddi]

it should also work without tar files, if you just put both files in the same subdirectory

[planetmaker]

There's no magic involved.

A few points where it might go wrong:

- you use another grf. rescan_newgrfs and checking the actual path of the file might help there. Similar versions are easily mixed up here. Sometimes it might be easier to restart OpenTTD
- not sure it works when the readme is not UTF-8 encoded. But I think it would just show weired characters then
- it is tar, not rar. People sometimes confuse that.

[frosch]

You should also not put the .grf and .txt directly top-level into the tar.
Instead add subfolder with a unique name inside the tar.

Due to historical reasons OTTD only considers the path inside the tar, and identifies files with equal paths. Thus if there is a readme at top-level inside the tar, it will mix with any other readme file at some top-level directory.

(Note that the reasons for this are purely historical; just noone changed/fixed it after the original reasons for it were gone with OTTD 1.2.)

[Andrew350]

Aha, thanks everyone, simply putting everything in a subfolder was the trick. I was trying to just .tar the files directly, which doesn't work.