Journal Text as a Log File

[Germ]

So, you just spent the last week fighting, farming, and treasure hunting to get a lot of loot; you spent countless hours IDing it all, and now you want to sell your treasures, but the prospect of spending another couple of hours manually typing all of your loot up is just too much for you.

You spend your nights macroing away, but for some reason you always wake up dead! You go to look at your journal to see what happened, but the events are long gone. You are discouraged, and click that save log file option in the options window, but nothing happens! Don't fear, just follow these steps and soon you can read your log file at your convenience.

I make no warranty if you screw something up in these configuration files that your Ultima Online will still work properly, do this at your own risk if you know what the heck you are doing. I don't believe you could do anything to permanently hurt your settings, but if you don't know what you are doing, don't do this.

Go to the directory your UO is installed to Program Files -> Ultima Online for example.
Find the file uo.cfg
Open the file in Notepad
Find the line SaveJournal=off, change it to SaveJournal=on
Find the line JournalSaveUnicode=off, leave it set to off (you can change it to on, but I prefer it off)

Go into the Desktop Folder inside the Ultima Online Folder, then into the folder of the account the character is on, then into the SecondAge folder, then the character you want to log the journal of.

Find the file uo.cfg
Open the file in Notepad
Find the line SaveJournal=off, change it to SaveJournal=on
Find the line JournalSaveUnicode=off, leave it set to off (you can change it to on, but I prefer it off)

In this same file, find the line:
PlayerName=XXXXXXX (your name)
DefaultChar=0 (or 1 depending on if they were the last character you logged in)

After these two lines, append an additional line, so it looks like

PlayerName=XXXXXXX (your name)
DefaultChar=0 (or 1)
JournalSaveFile=UO[yourcharactername].dat

I have experimented with changing the name and location of the log file. You can end it in .txt to make it easier to double click open it in notepad if your .dat files don't default to opening in notepad. You can also give it a different save folder destination for example C:\Documents and Settings\UserID\Desktop\UOCharacterName.txt will make it save as a text file to your desktop (in XP). It appears to continually append to this file location. If you don't give it a different directory to save to, it will save into your main UO directory.

So now you can open it, copy and paste, edit a little bit, and get your weapon list:
You see: an accurate war mace of might
You see: a substantial, accurate viking sword of might
You see: a gnarled staff of magic arrow (18 charges)
You see: a gnarled staff of greater healing (5 charges)
You see: an eminently accurate axe
You see: a surpassingly accurate war hammer of might
You see: a substantial quarter staff

I post my sources! I didn't figure this out all on my own, but google searched for it. Here is the original site which appears to be a russian shard <shrugs>: http://staff.theabyss.ru/?p=custom&lang=en

I simply took their guide, and expanded on the options. Now you can have a text file of your journal on your desktop, where you can easily edit it in notepad, copy and paste it into the forums.

Feel free to post any questions or problems you have, and I will do my best to step you through the process. Feel free to PM me with any questions as well.

Thanks to Dagon for these two tips:
For a list of the editable options in the configuration file go to: http://uo.stratics.com/php-bin/show_con ... tent=31210
If you have journals logging enabled for multiple characters and you log out of character 1 and into character 4 without fully shutting down ultima online, then your journal log for character 4 will appear in character 1's journal log.


Germ

[Dagon]

http://uo.stratics.com/php-bin/show_con ... tent=31210

couple notes:

if you ever plan on actually using the journal for anything, keep JournalSaveUnicode=off if you turn it on your log ends up looking like this
C h a r a c t e r : Y o u s e e a b i r d
not very useful

also, the client's journal logging is very bad. even if you set up a journal for every character (in each character's uo.cfg) unless you completely shut down the client inbetween logging out/in new characters the journal will always be logged to the first character that was logged in.. so you may be trying to find something in journal_char1.txt but it's really in journal_char4.txt because char4 was the first one logged in.

[Germ]

Yeah Dagon, having it on made for a pretty hideous looking journal file, not sure why anyone would want it that way, maybe if you were playing in another language (the russian site said to have it on) and unicode was the only way to make it display characters correctly.

Good tip on the multiple characters thing. I did not realize this as I only have the journal enabled on one of my characters. Going to include the link and that tip in the original post. Thanks Dagon.


Germ