Minor game text improvements

[ILikeProgramming]

The last post makes me think of something else. How will a campaign author make his WML numbers become words? Example: "You see $wml_var enemies approaching." This will always output a number.

[rchandra]

The last post makes me think of something else. How will a campaign author make his WML numbers become words? Example: "You see $wml_var enemies approaching." This will always output a number.

It is a pretty common assignment in introductory programming classes. I don't know WML, but I assume it wouldn't be difficult to write a function to handle that. It could return "$wml_var" if the number is greater than the range you want to be spelled out (say, 99 or 100).

edit: given your username, I suspect I have just swallowed my foot and this actually isn't easy in wml. Oh well.

[CIB]

edit: given your username, I suspect I have just swallowed my foot and this actually isn't easy in wml. Oh well.

If you want 100 lines more per number, no problem. Otherwise, problem. Hopefully WML functions will get added.

[Jetrel]

1+3) IMO using "hit points" and "multi-player" (as opposed to "hitpoints" and "multiplayer") would actual make us look less professional, and more like we were non-native English speakers who had just looked up the words in a dictionary.

2) Sounds good to me. I'm not sure where example of numbers in-text appear, though - could you point some out?

4) I'm not sure it's possible. A few possible problems with it; those symbols might not appear in the fonts, it wouldn't be possible to have them in the WML directly, since that's plaintext, so I'm not sure how we would do that. Perhaps something like "Deals 5$ndash|20 damage" (which would be rendered "Deals 5-20 damage" but with the ndash glyph). If it is, I agree it might be a good idea. Not sure it's worth the effort though.

Basically, what he said.

1] & 3] The use of hyphenated words is an archaism. English is now like german, at least in america - we just combine the words outright. The use of hyphens, especially for extremely common terms like hitpoint, actually looks comical and old-fashioned. C.f. Master Stilgar's dialogue between those two character clichés.

2] Within dialogue, yes, we should already be doing this - if there are any instances were we abuse this rule, please do find them and point them out (such as - "Lord Konrad, there are 3 orcs approaching!"). Within statistical readouts, we should always be using numerals; tradition for things like ledgers holds here; you would always write $3, not $three.

4] Yeah, I see where you're coming from, however the implementation details foul this up. As turin said, we may have significant problems guaranteeing that said characters are in the several different fonts we have, and may have problems storing them in the text encoding of our WML, or typing them into computers at all (I know this can relatively easily be done on a mac - you just use the option and/or shift modifiers when typing the "-" key, but I don't know if it's easy on a PC). Last but not least, we have the trouble of keeping all the campaign authors educated on proper use of the three varieties of dash, which would probably be a bit involved.


So to sum things up, if you'd like to scour around for places where we run afoul of #2 (reading through the wml directly would probably be the quickest way to do it, and/or reading through the english-english translation files), and report any obvious violations, we could clear those up.

[JW]

I'd prefer to see this time invested in reallyimproving the game, and maybe giving the remaining units some missing animations (like death animations for example).

It's not necessarily a waste of time if people like the original poster are pros at this, and specialize in this. I mean, you can technically say that stuff like units' idle animations are a waste of time. (or death animations, for that matter, since it's perfectly acceptable, albeit not as nice-looking, to have a simple fade-out without animation)

Just to throw this out there...

I think death animations ARE a waste of time. (unless we're taking about the Wose, man....FREAKING AWESOME!!!)

[Anym]

Sorry to revive this topic, but after reading the manual and playing the tutorial, both of which use both "hitpoints" and "hit points", I was wondering which of the two to report as SpellingMistakes. I don't have a strong preference for either form, but would very much appreciate consistency in the spelling.

[VS]

Erm, then register on wiki and add it there? The worst that could happen is someone (who goes over that page to correct the problems) decides this is not a problem and leaves it be.

[turin]

*sigh* That's not what Anym asked. He wants to know whether "hitpoints" or "hit points" is the preferred spelling, no more, no less.

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Anym: IIRC "hitpoints" is preferred, so report all instances of "hit points" as spelling mistakes.

[VS]

Ah, sorry. I meant he should report the inconsistencies - probably should have been clearer about this. Now that I look at it back, the post indeed came out really stupid