Messages

1

Released Mods / Re: Vanilla TFTD translation questions

« on: July 07, 2019, 06:53:10 pm »

Understood.

I think the vanilla strings are out of Nord's hands now. He has always been super cooperative and interested in making the game look as nice as it can. Really, I was just thankful to have a way to contribute, and he always included my contribution.

But as it stands now (see the rest of this thread), there's no way to correct vanilla strings or meld them with the mod strings, so there will always be this clear division between a modder's work and the vanilla product.

Anyway, thanks for replying, and I'm sorry for whining about this again. I don't want to annoy you guys because I think I will never grasp the time and effort you all have put into this project. It really is impressive what you all have achieved.

@SupSuper
If you would ever consider approving a PR to include corrections to vanilla strings, I would be happy to do the work. Thanks.

2

Released Mods / Re: Vanilla TFTD translation questions

« on: July 07, 2019, 04:23:34 pm »

@Solarius Scorch

I saw you mentioned Transifex on the TWoTS forum. I wonder if there is a way to add another language called something like "Corrected Vanilla Strings en-US" so that we can choose this option if we want to use a corrected and proofread version of the vanilla strings (along with the rest of the TWoTS English strings).

Months ago I found out it was impossible to correct the mistakes in the vanilla TFTD strings (misspellings, sloppy composite strings, inconsistent naming of Alien species, etc.) and also make these corrections available for others to use. So I basically chose to quit investing time in the English translations for TWoTS since there will always remain such awful errors in the vanilla strings anyway.

So, indeed, the question is: could adding a new language be used as a workaround to overwrite the mistakes in the vanilla strings? At least this way those of us who want the final presentation to be complete would have an easy way to make that happen.

3

Released Mods / Re: Vanilla TFTD translation questions

« on: April 20, 2019, 04:59:20 pm »

I see. Okay, then. Thanks for telling me.

4

Released Mods / Re: Vanilla TFTD translation questions

« on: April 19, 2019, 06:06:23 pm »

Thanks for starting a new thread for me. 

I looked through SupSuper's changes to the language file handing. I think I understand what is going on, and it looks to me like the vanilla strings have to be changed in the OXC repository in order to be included.

Therefore, I have made a fork and I will (eventually) be submitting a pull request to get these corrected vanilla strings merged.

I assume this is the way I should go about getting these corrections to the vanilla strings included. I would like to ask, however, are there reasons why this hasn't been done yet, other than it being a very low priority? I mean to say, would I be wasting my time, e.g. if you all already know you don't want to include these corrections?

5

Released Mods / Re: Vanilla TFTD translation questions

« on: April 19, 2019, 01:45:42 pm »

I see. I can't say I understand all of the issues, but I can see that it is not simple to fix. If I understand it correctly, overwriting the vanilla US English strings now also overwrites the corresponding vanilla strings in other languages (but not the other way around). I only ask for my own understanding (out of curiosity). I am sure you guys know way more about the constraints and dependencies than I ever will.

I tried searching the forum for evidence of what has been done already, but I couldn't find what I was looking for. Specifically, it looks like over the years there was lots of talk about the US English strings (probably only for UFO, and not TFTD), but I couldn't find anything that said if the US English strings have already been corrected/updated for TFTD. Do you know if this has been done already?

This is a task I would be happy to help with, but there would be no point unless:

• I follow the conventions you all set years ago
• It is worth your while to include it when it's done (and it does actually get included)

There is also the problem of how to get such a file to new users, since the files from Steam will still have only vanilla stuff. That raises another question: would that be against forum policy (posting original i.e. edited vanilla files here)?

6

Released Mods / Re: Vanilla TFTD translation questions

« on: April 19, 2019, 11:58:58 am »

No, US files are not affected by other languages.

That's good to know. Thank you.

Edit: also plural of cortex is not cortex's, but cortexes or cortices

Indeed, you are right! You found this error in the vanilla string for the Bio-drone autopsy. This is exactly what I am talking about. The vanilla TFTD strings have quite a few mistakes and many inconsistencies in naming, e.g. "Gillmen, Gillman, Gill Man". Up until v2.26 of TWoTS, the en-US.yml file included well over one hundred corrections for the vanilla TFTD strings, again with the goal of polishing the vanilla product and making the extension of TFTD into TWoTS a seamless experience as much as possible (at least aesthetically).

Now I am told these corrections cannot be included due to some compatibility requirements of OXCE between the Russian and English strings, so the vanilla strings are no longer overwritten, and they are kept as they were in 1995.

7

Released Mods / Vanilla TFTD translation questions

« on: April 18, 2019, 10:42:08 am »

I don't care about this at all to be honest.
Vanilla game also says "ALIENS TERRORIZE Casablanca" and I was never bothered by that; I guess 99% of people aren't.
...
Summary: just keep vanilla strings vanilla

Thank you, Meridian, for clearing this up for me. I think you are right that most people don't get bothered by inconsistent or poorly formatted text strings. The information gets to the user, and the user moves on.

For me, when playing the old vanilla TFTD, these issues always distracted me. Seeing stuff like "ALIENS TERRORIZE Casablanca" makes me wonder why that wasn't corrected. Did the original developers run out of time, budget, or QA? And then of course you have to wonder, what else is wrong with the game. Well, as we now know, there were also bugs in the research tree, etc.

These kinds of things just make the game feel incomplete, and sometimes even sloppy, and I guess the ultimate question raised by this is: Am I getting the experience intended by the game's authors, or I am spending my time on a watered-down/incomplete/rushed version of what they intended? To make an analogy that I am sure Nord would appreciate: Am I going to enjoy my evening by watching the director's cut of the movie The Abyss, or am I going to settle for watching the theatrical release of The Abyss? Bearing in mind that I won't get that time back either way, I would really prefer to enjoy the proper version as the creators intended it.

Anyway, I know I am preaching to the choir here. You guys have certainly shown that you care a great deal about the quality of the game. It was really fun to be a tiny part of that.

Meridian, may I ask you something? Say I go through the vanilla TFTD string files and make my corrections just for myself (not changing any string names, only the text). I then copy this corrected file along with the rest of the vanilla TFTD files into the \TWoTS X.XX\TFTD subdirectory (like we do with every update). Will doing this create any conflicts for me?

8

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.26)

« on: April 14, 2019, 09:46:10 pm »

Hey guys,

First off I want to say thanks again to Nord for authoring the mod, and thanks to Meridian for the very entertaining play though of it.

I would like to ask you two (Meridian and Nord, specifically): Do you care that much if the text strings that the user reads are not consistent? I mean, I believe you would probably prefer if things look uniform throughout the game, but I also know that you have way more important things to do with the mod and with OXCE than bothering with spelling and capitalization.

So for example, in order to make the alert strings consistent, I had to capitalize the city names, so that instead of reading "ALIEN BARGE AT Darwin", it would read "ALIEN BARGE AT DARWIN". Writing "Alien Barge at Darwin" wasn't an option because of the way the strings are set up. I also spent a lot of time correcting inconsistencies and even misspellings in the Vanilla TFTD strings by "rewriting" them in the mod's en-US.yml file.

Lastly, there is that problem with the mission briefings not showing up properly if you review the mission briefing from the battlescape (usually the mission marker is missing).


Now, it looks like the latest improvements to OXCE require the Russian and English mod-specific string files to be "the same" somehow, which means that all the corrections I made to the vanilla strings by having them get overwritten by the mod's English strings file are basically undone because they have been deleted. Again, no big deal because I know you guys are fixing important aspects related to gameplay. That means, though, that you will see noticeable inconsistencies between vanilla TFTD USOpedia, etc and TWoTS USOpedia, etc.

You guys are in charge of how to structure the mod and OXCE, so I am asking you: would you be interested in helping me edit the proper files so that the USOpedia, etc strings from the TWoTS mod and vanilla TFTD are seamless? In other words, I could go through the vanilla strings and make those consistent and correct on their own, and then adapt the TWoTS strings to match (instead of the other way around), and that way the vanilla TFTD strings file can be used in future mods, too.


It's really up to you two, Meridian and Nord, if you are interested in this. I am truly happy to do the proofreading and correcting work on the files themselves, but without you two including the files in future OXCE and TWoTS versions, there is no point in me doing the work because future changes might mean there is a conflict, and then work is deleted.

Thank you for reading this far. I know you two are dealing with much more important stuff related to the game, and I respect that. I love the idea of contributing somehow (even if it's really small compared to your efforts), but if it is not worth the extra trouble for you guys then I know I should just let it go.

Congrats on your newest releases.

[Spoiler]

9

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.21)

« on: November 30, 2018, 08:18:14 pm »

Hi Nord,

I want to start by telling you what a great job you did on the

Spoiler:

alien barge mission.

It is super well done, very detailed, and extremely challenging. If I wasn't a such a save-scumming piece of shit, I would never have completed the mission with the current tech I have. My curiosity got the best of me, though, and I really just wanted to see more of the mission, so I kept going even though it was clear very early on that I did not deserve to even get to turn 10.

So I have some bugs to report for you. I have attached save files in a zip folder so that people can't see the names of the saves. I tried to name them after the bugs so you can find your way through them easily.

Spoiler:

Before I forget, I attached a save at the start of the mission in case you need it for something. I will just call the aliens "aliens" because I know people look at the spoilers anyway.

The first thing you notice is that you can walk off the front back and sides of the ship. That's fine for the player because he will figure out right away not to do that, or he can go explore the outside of the barge with the aqua-lung or exosuit (which I did bc it was really cool).

The problem is that the aliens can walk off the edge, too. IDK why the hell they would, but one did when I played. In save 101 you can see him at the top rear deck of the barge, thinking about jumping, and I saved right before he does it. Save 102 is another save some time later just after I found him. Also save 102 is a good chance to see if you think the exosuit might be a bit overpowered, because I had one instance where I took 3 shots from that alien with no damage. Could just be luck, though.

A similar issue can be found in save 201. There you will see a (large) alien that has wandered completely away from the action. I chased him all over the place because I didn't think to use debug mode until really later on (like turn 70). 

In save 301, I have a large alien basically pinned down at that elevator. He wants to come up and attack, but if I don't move, he can't come up. This exploit existed in vanilla, too, so I guess it's not a bug, but it can also cause inconvenience. I can't free up that path without losing someone or doing something exploitative. Just something to think about. I think everybody knows about this issue with TFTD.

Save 401 is not a bug. It shows a person called "Yehide" towards the lower back of the barge. I am asking you to consider putting a small/narrow door there to link that back corner room with the largest room. Otherwise there's just a big dead end there which was kind of annoying. It's just a minor request, though. I really think the level is beautifully done.

The last save, save 501, is for you to have so you can review the end of mission stats. Just shoot a torpedo at the central elevator with Lielit to kill the last large alien (who is "stuck" there again). In the mission stats, you can see that there are so many unique items to list that the list runs into the buttons. It looks to me that if you were to remove three unique loot items, then the whole list (including the total) should probably fit correctly on the page. If I may suggest: take out Alien Reanimation Zone (since there are only 2, and maybe it doesn't make sense on the barge anyway), and for the other two, I don't know (but maybe alien sub construction (since it's a barge, not a sub), and alien cloning (since it's not a base)). It's up to you. I guess it depends also one what objects you show in the barge.

This last one makes me feel kinda stupid, but I find that the large torpedo and heavy torpedo sprites are somewhat difficult to tell apart at a glance. Could the heavy torpedoes get a blue ring or something, since the Advanced Torpedo launcher has noticeably wider blue rings at each end?

I also noticed that I can't manufacture the Vibro Blade, even though I have researched it. See save 601. That might not be a bug, though.

Thanks for reading.

10

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.20)

« on: October 31, 2018, 09:55:09 pm »

Please find attached the updated English translations for v2.20.

Nord, I have converted my file to yml, and I have included your latest updates. It was easier than I expected

Users: Please copy this file into the following folder location and overwrite the en-US.yml which is already there.

...\TWoTS_2_20\User\mods\TWoTS\Language

Enjoy!

11

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.19)

« on: October 22, 2018, 09:52:41 am »

I just finished watching Meridian's episode 5 of TWoTS. Meridian, I have to say that the Line of Fire obstructions highlighter is absolutely brilliant. It is elegant and very impressive.

Regarding the training pools, I also think they train up the aquanauts quite quickly. Compared to vanilla X-Com, it takes significantly less time to get good soldiers. I, for one, LOVE this, though! I know it's not the same as earning good soldiers through constantly struggling and training them in each mission, but I don't miss that part of the game. Training aquanauts used to mean making a conscious decision to hold off on completing the mission objectives just to shoot MC'ed Lobster Men with weak pistols so you can increase your aquanaut's firing accuracy. I hated doing that. It's even worse when training MC skills. WAY worse. I think it's a huge waste of time and very boring. It's probably the number one reason lose control of myself and save scum: I just don't want to re-train my soldiers.

In my recently started playthrough of TWoTS, I am not constantly stuck with the weakest, worst-performing aquanauts money can buy. After a month or two and a few real missions, they are decently reliable. Now, finally, every mission isn't a chess match. I can take risks! That is SO much more fun to me! I truly admire the patience and strategy I've seen in some of the Let's Play's, and watching them has made me a better player, but I guess I am just not always so patient. Especially if I have been playing for hours and it's like my fourth mission in that sitting, I just want to blast through it as much as I can. Otherwise, it's just too tedious and I need a break.

Anyway, maybe that's a super unpopular view about the missions, but I definitely feel this way. I love the new training pools. I don't think they are unrealistic either. Imagine an aquanaut's day: wake up, train, sleep, repeat. Their job is to stay fit for the missions. If they train every day or even just five days a week, I bet after 15 days (assuming the aquanaut goes on two missions per month), he would be stronger and a better marksman.

However you might feel about this, it seems like there is a good opportunity to introduce balancing for each difficultly level through nerfing/buffing of the training pools. I am curious what others think about this, or the training pools in general.

12

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.19)

« on: October 22, 2018, 09:26:27 am »

1. mission descriptions are missing something... either the word "UNDER" should not be there or it should be followed by what is it actually under

Nord, I noticed this one as well. Unfortunately I did not have a save file to give you. What's strange is that these missions DO have a marker name. Also, the mission briefing comes together properly in New Battle mode.

See the attached screenshot. The words "ALIEN ASSAULT" are the marker name, which appears on the geoscape when you click the location, and also appears in the mission briefing screen. This made the mission briefing screen a little tricky to prepare, since I always had to choose a title (the top line) which would flow well with the marker name, and the marker name always has to be concise enough to make clear what the mission is and also fit inside that small dialogue box on the geoscape.

This trick of having the title make a complete sentence with the marker name isn't too difficult in English, but I imagine translations to other languages will be more difficult because of this. Does anybody know a better way to do this?

Anyway, Nord, in my testing I could not figure out why just this ALIEN ASSAULT mission has this problem with the mission briefing. So far it's the only mission with this problem that I have found in my playthrough. The cheapest fix is just to delete the word "UNDER", but it would be nice to correct the cause of the error in case it happens in other missions, too. That's your choice, my friend.

13

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.19)

« on: October 14, 2018, 09:33:43 pm »

Your work is highly appreciated. Of course most updated version shall be used. Sorry for not all done from your posts, distractions IRL.

Thanks, Nord. I am glad you are satisfied.


Solarius Scorch, thanks for taking care of the file conversion. Is there something I should do differently in the future that would make your work easier, or is this kind of a one time thing?

14

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.19)

« on: October 14, 2018, 05:35:34 pm »

Hi everyone,

Wall of text here (sorry), but there are a few things I would like to explain. I would be thankful to Nord, Solarius Scorch, and Meridian in particular for taking the time to read it. (Meridian maybe can skip to 2nd to last paragraph)

After v2.18 was released, I started a playthrough of TWoTS to finally check out the mod, and also to further debug as many of the English strings that I could. Of course, I have already been working on this file with Nord for a year now, but I still find small things that need to be corrected, like missing articles, incorrect conjugations, and most of all, capitalization inconsistencies.

I try to do my part to make the experience more immersive each time, which to me means removing any distractions that remind the player that the game isn’t perfect, and that some parts of the game are from the mod and some parts are from the vanilla game. So for example, before v2.18 came out, I went through and tried my best to unify the vanilla mission briefings with the TWoTS mission briefings so that they all look the same and use mostly the same way of instructing the player. In this way I hope to make it so a brand new X-Com player can’t tell what’s vanilla and what’s TwoTS when playing this mod. Nord included this round of corrections in the 2.18 release (thanks, again!).

To continue working towards this goal, after v2.18 came out I then tried to unify the vanilla UFOpedia articles with the TWoTS UFOpedia articles, which means that I went through probably 70% of the vanilla UFOpedia strings and tried to make them consistent with the TWoTS strings. For example, in the vanilla strings there were some places where “Gillman” was one word, some places where it was two words (Gill Man), and some places where is was plural (Gillmen). These inconsistencies are distracting to me, and I find many such small problems with the vanilla strings (again, mostly inconsistent capitalizations or use of hyphens), so I have corrected as many as I could find so far. I did this by copying the vanilla strings from en-US.yml into ExtraStrings.rul and making the corrections there.

You might guess that the next thing I would want to do is make the mission alerts (the splash dialogues that show up on the geoscape) consistent between vanilla and TWoTS. Such a guess would be correct.

Now, just prior to Nord’s release of v2.19, I submitted another update of the ExtraStrings.rul file to him which included all these corrections to the vanilla strings mentioned above. However, he did not include this in the 2.19 release. This is no big deal because I know he has his hands full. BUT, now that I see Solarius Scorch is setting up the mod to be translated into other languages, I really want to make sure my latest corrections file is used so that I don’t lose at least two days’ worth of work, but more importantly so that people don’t start translating a ton of (minorly) incorrect texts!

Of course, Nord also made some other corrections to the ExtraStrings.rul file for the v2.19 release as well. I have gone through and merged these two files (thank god for git!), and you will find it attached. Nord, just to reassure you that this ExtraStrings.rul has your latest work, please look at this list of changes that I saw you made, which I then included in the attached file:
- lines 970-973 deleted
- lines 975-1103 deleted
- lines 1107-1206 deleted
- lines 1210-1218 deleted
- lines 613-619 use “Alien Barge” for the name, and not “Alien Lab Sub”
- line 106 uses your corrected way of explaining the Water Pressure Concept

So, Nord, I hope this attached file will have your blessing to be used by Solarius Scorch for Transifex.

Solarius Scorch, I think it’s great that you want to put this mod up on Transifex. I mentioned it briefly before, but just to be clear: for my corrections of the vanilla strings, I have been copying from the en-US.yml file and adding those strings near the end of the ExtraStrings.rul file. When I did this, I did not know that the en-US.yml file would be used for Transifex (or even that this mod would be put on Transifex). The benefit of my approach was that I never changed the en-US.yml file myself.

So now I am kindly asking: If you are going to merge the ExtraStrings.rul file into the en-US.yml file, please use the attached ExtraStrings.rul file instead of the one that came with v2.19, and for the vanilla strings, please be sure to use the ones I corrected (in the attached file) and not the default ones.

I realize that what I am asking is a lot work, because I just got done doing all that work. To make things worse, I only corrected the vanilla strings that I believed needed to be corrected, so how can anyone but me know which ones they are without reading every single one? On top of this, they are in no particular order, only roughly grouped together by category. So, of course, I volunteer to merge these files if you don’t want to do this.

I want to ask, though: If you simply added the full contents of the ExtraStrings.rul file to the end of the en-US.yml file, would that be enough to make sure my corrections of the vanilla strings are used in Transifex? I believe the TFTD game itself just uses the last read copy of any text string encountered when compiling. Does it work the same way with Transifex? Because if so then there really isn’t much work involved.

And finally, Meridian, if you are going to start your LP any time soon, please use the attached ExtraStrings.rul file. After watching your last Area 50 episode and hearing that you plan to play TWoTS sometime, I dropped what I was doing Friday morning for six hours to try to fix as many more things as I could in the English strings (vanilla and TWoTS) to get ready to push another round of corrections to Nord. I know you hold modders to a particularly high standard when it comes to the English text the player sees in game (and I know I am painting a target on my back here), so it would be a shame if you didn’t have my latest round of corrections. It still won’t be perfect because reading hundreds of lines for English mistakes isn’t as effective as reading one at a time as you play the game, but still, the attached file represents my best efforts yet.

IF anybody made it to the end of this, I really thank you for reading it. I’m just trying to avoid losing a bunch of work I just did, but again, that’s not as important as making sure the best version of the file is the one that gets used for Transifex and any high-profile LP that is about to showcase what a great job Nord did making this mod. 

[Spoiler]

15

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.18)

« on: October 12, 2018, 10:51:29 am »

Hi Nord,

Spoiler:

I need to ask you about the Alien Barge mission. Is it an underwater mission or a surface mission?

Based on the mission briefing, which says "floating alien barge", and the fact that the site on the geoscape was on land in Fiji, it seems like a surface mission.

However, the mission itself is underwater, and all my surface weapons are hidden from view when I start the mission. Plus, the music is for underwater missions.

So, I propose this: I will change the description to be called "Alien Submersible" which should imply that it is an underwater mission, and I think you should change the mission location to be generated in the middle of the ocean somewhere. With those two things changed it should be clear that it is an underwater mission. Hopefully this will be the least amount of work for you, too (as long as you intended this to be an underwater mission).

I have attached a save file with my Triton on the way to the mission. If you want to see what weapons I was going to take, just return the Triton to base and look.

On a separate issue, I have acquired 'Old Alien Flight Records' (fun mission to get those, by the way), but I cannot see it in the research topics yet. Maybe I haven't met all the research requirements to see it, but I don't know how to look that up without spoiling everything for myself. You can also see this in the attached save file. Look in 'Sell/Sack' and you will see that I have 'Old Alien Flight Records'.

Also, when you have a chance, please send me your latest English strings file with the updated descriptions for the things Meridian asked about (or just PM me with those two descriptions). I can then update them and then send you my latest English string file before your next release. School is about to start up for me again, so I would like to give you my latest corrections soon so you will have them for your next release.