Some languages have different spellings of wordy numbers based on the
gender of the things they're counting (uno crewmate versus una trinket)
or what a number's role is in the sentence (e.g. twenta out of twentu).
We've always had the idea we couldn't support such complex differences
though, because the game can't be adapted to know what gender each
object will have and what word classes might exist in other languages,
so translators would in those cases just have to forgo the wordy
numbers and just let the game use "20 out of 20".
A solution we came up semi-recently though (after all translations were
finished except for Arabic), was to allow the translator to define
however many classes of wordy numbers they need, and fill them all out.
This would not need the game to be *adapted* for every language's
specific grammar and word genders/classes. Instead, the translator
would just choose their correct self-defined class at the time they use
`wordy` in the VFormat placeholder. Something like
{n|wordy|class=feminine}, or {n|wordy_feminine}.
So this would benefit several languages, but we came up with the
solution a little late for all languages to benefit from it. The Arabic
translators asked for two separate classes of wordy numbers though, so
my plan is to first just have a second list of wordy numbers
(translation2 in numbers.xml), which can be accessed by passing the
`wordy2` flag to VFormat, instead of `wordy`.
Once 2.4 is released, we can take our time to do it properly. This
would involve the ability for translators to define however many
classes they need, to name them what they want, and this name would
then be useable in VFormat placeholders. We can convert all existing
translations to have one class defined by default, such as "wordy", or
"translation" depending on implementation, but there's not so much
concern for maintaining backwards compatibility here, so we can do a
mass-switchover for all language files. That said, it wouldn't be too
hard to add a special case for "translation" being "wordy" either.
We can then ask translators if they would like to change anything with
the new system in place.
For now, we can use this system for Arabic, maybe Spanish since there
were complaints about uno/una, and *maybe* Dutch (it has a thing where
the number "one" is often capitalized differently, but it's not
mandatory per se)
If your language has a bigger font, the max attribute isn't really
helpful to you as a translator, so the sync feature adds a special
max_local attribute which is accurate to the font size. This was
already documented in advance.
If used, we now also write an attribute in the root tag of strings.xml
and strings_plural.xml, that looks like max_local_for="12x12". I
decided to add this attribute after finding out the Excel macros would
be really hard to change to only show a max_local column if it is ever
used (it'd need to look ahead through the strings until it finds a
string with a max, or remove the column if no string has used it), but
it's also a convenience for translators.
I especially focused on graphics.len and the print calls around them,
because graphics.len calls appear a bit less often, might be overlooked
when migrating print calls (thus possibly using different fonts by
accident) and are often used for some kind of right-alignment or
centering which can be changed into PR_RIGHT or PR_CEN with a different
X anyway.
Notably, I also added a new function to generate these kinds of
sliders: ....[]............
Different languages means that the slider for analogue stick
sensitivity needs to be longer to fit possibly long words for
Low/Medium/High, and then different font sizes means that the longer
slider won't fit onscreen in a language that needs a 12-wide font. So
slider_get() can take a "target width", which dynamically changes the
number of characters depending on the width of them in the interface
font.
I kinda forgot that I could force the 8x8 font instead of adapting the
characters in the slider to the font, and other ideas (like using
different characters or a more graphical progress bar) have been
brought up on Discord, so this might all change again sooner or later.
This allows translators to test all text boxes in the scripts. It
doesn't run the scripts themselves - it only shows the basic appearance
of each text box individually, so context may be lost but it's good to
have a way to see any text boxes that might otherwise not be easily
seen because they require specific circumstances to appear.
