In Italian, "Credits" is "Riconoscimenti", which runs offscreen with
the 3x font size that this title uses in the rolling credits at the end
of the game. I'm not sure if the translators saw that specific
instance, or thought the limit complaint was about the main menu button
all along (which is more prominent and *does* stick out far enough that
the complaint could plausibly have been about that, from a translator's
perspective!)
Either way, it's solved now: this string's width is now checked, and if
it will run offscreen at 3x size, it will now be displayed at 2x size
instead. The limit has been increased from 13 to 20 in the language
files accordingly.
The language screen has a "Press Space, Z, or V to select" hint, which
I forgot to update for supporting button glyphs in #943, so this commit
does.
<action_hint>Press Space, Z, or V to select</action_hint>
<gamepad_hint>Press {button} to select</gamepad_hint>
This was easier than I expected - just add an optional buttons="1"
attribute to cutscenes.xml. It's treated like the speaker attribute -
it's only there as context for the translator, and for the cutscene
test.
Due to rebasing messiness and diff noise, it's probably best if pull
requests either don't sync all the language files at all (and only
modify the English ones) OR only do it as a final commit. It's still
something we need to figure out, lol.
This updates all language files to the latest version.
- Some minor errors are also fixed - for example, a small number of
changes were made to the English string instead of the translation.
Alignment of the dimensional stability generator terminal is also
improved in several languages.
- I also discovered that the string "Complete the game" appears twice -
and has, to be consistent with adjacent strings, two separate
translations in Portuguese (PT). So this string now properly has two
different cases so it can be translated separately.
- The limit for TIME/SHINY/LIVES has been bumped from 7 to 8
"by {author}" is a string that will cause a lot of localization-related
problems, which then become much worse when different languages and
levels can also need different fonts:
- If the author name is set to something in English instead of a name,
then it'll come out a bit weird if your VVVVVV is set to a different
language: "de various people", "por various people", etc. It's the
same problem with Discord bots completing "playing" or "watching" in
their statuses.
- Translators can't always fit "by" in two letters, and level creators
have understandably always assumed, and will continue to assume, that
"by" is two letters. So if you have your VVVVVV set to a language that
translates "by" as something long, then:
| by Various People and Others |
...may suddenly show up as something like:
|thorer Various People and Othe|
- "by" and author may need mutually incompatible fonts. For example, a
Japanese level in a Korean VVVVVV needs to be displayed with "by" in
Korean characters and the author name with Japanese characters, which
would need some very special code since languages may want to add
text both before and after the name.
- It's very possible that some languages can't translate "by" without
knowing the gender of the name, and I know some languages even
inflect names in really interesting ways (adding and even replacing
letters in first names, surnames, and anything in between, depending
on gender and what else is in the sentence).
So to solve all of this, the "by" is now replaced by a 10x10 face from
sprites.png, like a :viridian: emote. See it as a kind of avatar next
to a username, to clarify and assert that this line is for the author's
name. It should be a fairly obvious/recognizable icon, it fixes all the
above problems, and it's a bonus that we now have more happy faces in
VVVVVV.
By default, when you open the level editor to start a new level, the
level font will now match your VVVVVV language; so if you're, say,
Japanese, then you can make Japanese levels from the get-go. If you
want to make levels for a different target audience, you can change the
font via a new menu (map settings > change description > change font).
The game will remember this choice and it will become the new initial
level font.
meta.xml can now have a <font> tag, which gives the name of the font
that the language needs. This will directly control the interface font
when the language is active, and will soon also control the font used
for each option on the language screen.
For some reason they all have their executable bits set. Presumably this
is because they were made on an NTFS system where every file is
executable (which doesn't sound secure at all but that's another story).
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.
