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.
