aliens

Author Topic: orphan strings  (Read 5836 times)

Offline moriarty

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orphan strings
« on: October 13, 2013, 11:57:21 am »
is there a list somewhere of the strings that exist in vanilla xcom / openxcom but aren't used?

if not, I'll try to start one here... including probably intended or possible uses, so that the translators may still translate them - a modder may want to make use of the strings :)


STR_XCOM_OPERATIVES_RETIRED_THROUGH_INJURY
not sure if this is ever used... it's part of the battlescape debriefing set. obviously it was intended to inform the player that a number of soldiers have been injured, although the word "retired" implies a kind of permanent loss of the soldier... I think maybe we should add a string "STR_XCOM_OPERATIVES_INJURED" to add this kind of information to the debriefing screen, and keep the original string in case somebody wants to mod the game for more realism, including a mechanic that removes soldiers with grave injuries from the active roster permanently. might be interesting :)

STR_HOSTILE / STR_NEUTRAL / STR_FRIENDLY / STR_COMMITTED
probably remnants of a kind of diplomatic system... best guess is that these were used to indicate the level of pissed-off-ness of funding nations. "committed" would probably indicate that they signed a pact with the aliens?

STR_DAMAGED_RETURNING_TO_BASE
implies a kind of damage threshold for xcom craft... so a craft severely damaged would automatically return to a base... perhaps this was a mechanic during development, but later discarded so that the player would be allowed to decide this entirely by himself. since the string is there, maybe this could become an optional feature? something like "dogfight breakoff damage threshold", toggleable between "never", "50%", "75%", "90%" ?

STR_SELECT_ACTION / STR_CONTINUE_INTERCEPTION_PURSUIT / STR_PURSUE_WITHOUT_INTERCEPTION
probably remnants of a geoscape popup intended to be used once a craft reaches the target UFO. replaced by the possibility to minimize a dogfight...

STR_ALIEN_CORPSE / STR_ALIEN
probably intended to be used in a similar way as "alien artifact" - giving a name for something without giving away what it is. since the actual name needs to be used in base stores, and the names are nicknames anyway, these strings weren't necessary (just like "alien artifact" isn't strictly necessary, either - it might be better to add " - unresearched" after the name. I mean, come on, your soldiers aren't blind, so you might as well call a gun a gun.

STR_RAW_MATERIALS
is this used at all? possibly it was once used as a component for a composite sentence structure, which had to be discarded because it wouldn't work in other languages :)


Offline SupSuper

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Re: orphan strings
« Reply #1 on: October 13, 2013, 06:15:05 pm »
STR_SELECT_ACTION / STR_CONTINUE_INTERCEPTION_PURSUIT / STR_PURSUE_WITHOUT_INTERCEPTION
probably remnants of a geoscape popup intended to be used once a craft reaches the target UFO. replaced by the possibility to minimize a dogfight...
I think this was supposed to be used for when UFOs are too high altitude for a dogfight, but they never are. It finds use in TFTD again when USOs are over land or too deep.

STR_ALIEN_CORPSE / STR_ALIEN
probably intended to be used in a similar way as "alien artifact" - giving a name for something without giving away what it is. since the actual name needs to be used in base stores, and the names are nicknames anyway, these strings weren't necessary (just like "alien artifact" isn't strictly necessary, either - it might be better to add " - unresearched" after the name. I mean, come on, your soldiers aren't blind, so you might as well call a gun a gun.

STR_RAW_MATERIALS
is this used at all? possibly it was once used as a component for a composite sentence structure, which had to be discarded because it wouldn't work in other languages :)
These come from the "manufacture categories":
  STR_CRAFT_WEAPON: "Craft Weapon"
  STR_CRAFT_AMMUNITION: "Craft Ammunition"
  STR_HEAVY_WEAPONS_PLATFORM: "Heavy Weapons Platform"
  STR_WEAPON: "Weapon"
  STR_AMMUNITION: "Ammunition"
  STR_EQUIPMENT: "Equipment"
  STR_ALIEN_CORPSE: "Alien Corpse"
  STR_UFO_COMPONENT: "UFO component"
  STR_PERSONAL_ARMOR: "Personal Armor"
  STR_RAW_MATERIALS: "Raw Materials"
  STR_HWP_CANNON_SHELLS: "HWP Cannon Shells"
I guess you were supposed to be able to manufacture raw materials at some point? And... corpses? :o

Some other ones:

STR_XCOM_PERFORMANCE_ROSTER / STR_ENTER_NAME / STR_PERFORMANCE_RATING / STR_VICTORY_DATE
Remnants of a highscore table? I guess it was dropped since you can just play and grind score forever.

STR_UNIT / STR_SKILLS / STR_LEVEL
RPG-like soldier stats?

Offline moriarty

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Re: orphan strings
« Reply #2 on: October 13, 2013, 06:24:23 pm »
I think this was supposed to be used for when UFOs are too high altitude for a dogfight, but they never are. It finds use in TFTD again when USOs are over land or too deep.

that explains it :)

Quote
I guess you were supposed to be able to manufacture raw materials at some point? And... corpses? :o
perhaps it was more like manufacturing stuff from corpses? and raw materials could be something like "extract raw materials from stuff"... looking at the plasma weapon clip ufopedia entries, where it explicitly mentions "contains a small amount of elerium", this sounds like a logical thing to come up during development, leading to the introduction of strings for it, which become orphaned later when the idea is discarded.

Quote
Some other ones:

STR_XCOM_PERFORMANCE_ROSTER / STR_ENTER_NAME / STR_PERFORMANCE_RATING / STR_VICTORY_DATE
Remnants of a highscore table? I guess it was dropped since you can just play and grind score forever.
makes perfect sense if you listened to julian gollop explaining the connection to civilization... perhaps they intended something like that.

Quote
STR_UNIT / STR_SKILLS / STR_LEVEL
RPG-like soldier stats?

oooh, nice! that's going to come in handy for any RPG-esque mod or conversion :) :)