In the past I was thinking we could use some kind of feature in VVVVVV
to track outdated strings across language files. But as it turns out, a
manual solution is actually *perfect* (in combination with automatic
syncing): duplicating strings and marking the old one as outdated. We
started doing it in recent PRs, so let's make it official by adding it
to the readme.
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.
This already happened on 2023-03-16, but I held off on updating the
repo's version a bit long: I wanted to wait a little to batch it up
with the next update, but the next update only arrived today, so...
`platv` is a room property that controls platform speed, and it has
always worked (other than some weird storage issues due to a bug).
However, the editor has no way to edit it currently, so people had to
resort to editing the level file by hand, or with a third-party tool.
This commit simply adds an easy way to modify platform speed.
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 adds mappings from SDL's Xbox-based SDL_GameControllerButton
constants, to glyphs for the following layouts:
- LAYOUT_NINTENDO_SWITCH_PRO,
- LAYOUT_NINTENDO_SWITCH_JOYCON_L,
- LAYOUT_NINTENDO_SWITCH_JOYCON_R,
- LAYOUT_DECK,
- LAYOUT_PLAYSTATION,
- LAYOUT_XBOX,
- LAYOUT_GENERIC,
There may still be errors in these, but they should be mostly correct.
I'm leaving it up to Ethan to make it show the correct button glyphs
for the correct controllers being connected (and possibly to fix these
mappings where needed).
Violet's dialogue now looks like this:
squeak(purple)
text(purple,0,0,2)
Remember that you can press {b_map}
to check where you are on the map!
position(purple,above)
textbuttons()
speak_active
The new textbuttons() command sets the next textbox to replace {b_map}
with the map button, and {b_int} with the interact button. The
remaining keys would be added as soon as they need to be added to
ActionSets.h as well.
This adds a function that converts an action (such as interacting
in-game) to the corresponding button text ("ENTER", "E") or button
glyph (PlayStation triangle, Steam Deck Y, etc). This function
currently only gives the existing ENTERs or Es, because I don't know
how best to detect controller usage, or whether the game is running on
a Steam Deck, or what buttons need to be displayed there. Still, it
should now be really easy to adapt the rendering of keyboard keys to
consoles, controllers, or rebound keys.
To identify the actions that currently need to be displayed, this
commit also adds the initial enums for action sets as described by
Ethan in a comment in #834 (Jan 18, 2022).
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
The following languages are new:
- French
- German
- Italian
- Portuguese (BR)
- Portuguese (PT)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Turkish
Esperanto has also received some updates.
These are from a fan translation that was originally made in 2020.
The files were kept around as a possible base for the future Spanish
translators, and now that a first version of the new Spanish
translation is being tested, it's time to remove this one. These files
are making it very annoying for me to test all the new translations and
then jump around between different commits (and they're already not in
the round 2 translator pack).
Actually, this won't really help with the jumping around different
commits part... But the sooner it's removed, the less confusing it will
be when different versions of the language pack are floating around and
the latest version needs to be added, and the less "Changes not staged
for commit" problems you'll get when testing the new language packs.
(Or two different españols being on the language screen)
There used to be two ways of fading in/out text in VVVVVV:
- Local code that modifies the R, G and B values of the text
- Keeping the RGB values the same and using the alpha channel
The latter approach is only used once, for [Press ENTER to return to
editor]. The former approach causes problems with colored (button)
glyphs: there's no way for the print function to tell from the RGB
values whether a color is "full Viridian-cyan" or "Viridian-cyan faded
out 50%", so I added the flag PR_COLORGLYPH_BRI(value) to tell the
print function that the color brightness is reduced to match the
brightness of colored glyphs to the brightness of the rest of the text.
However, there were already plans to make the single use of alpha
consistent with the rest of the game and the style, so PR_ALPHA(value)
could be removed, as well as the bit signifying whether the brightness
or alpha value is used. For the editor text, I simply copied the "Press
{button} to teleport" behavior of hiding the text completely if it
becomes darker than 100/255.
Another simplification is to make the print function handle not just
the brightness of the color glyphs while local code handled the
brightness of the normal text color, but to make the print function
handle both. That way, the callsite can simply pass in the full colors
and the brightness flag, and the flag name can be made a lot simpler as
well: PR_BRIGHTNESS(value).
"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.
Did another complete proofread of all the non-roomnames (hadn't looked
through *everything* in a while), and it's just three little things
that I felt would be important enough to tweak.
The strings "Vitellary"/"Vermilion"/"Verdigris"/"Victoria" now have two
cases to support changing them for the intermission replay menu options
(like "with Vitellary").
Also, the string "< and > keys change tool" is now "{button1} and
{button2} keys change tool", so it can be changed dynamically without
having to retranslate the string.
I wanted to not complicate the system with different string cases (like
cgettext) if possible, and I have been able to keep the main strings a
simple English=Translation mapping thus far, but apparently strings
like "Rescued!" (which are one string in English), have to be
translated for the correct gender in some languages. So this was a good
time to add support for string cases anyway.
It's a number that can be given to a string to specify the specific
case it's used, to disambiguate identical English keys. In the case of
"Rescued!" and "Missing...", male versions of the string are case 1,
female versions are case 2, and Viridian being missing is case 3. Of
course, if a language doesn't need to use different variants, it can
simply fill in the same string for the different cases.
If any other string needs to switch to different cases: distinguish
them in the English strings.xml with the case="N" attribute (N=1 and
higher), sync language files from the translator menu (existing
translations for the uncased string will simply be copied to all cases)
and change loc::gettext("...") to loc::gettext_case("...", 1),
loc::gettext_case("...", 2), etc.
With a single README.txt for both translators and maintainers, both
have to read through info that's not relevant for them, because
translators don't need to worry about the specifics of adding new
English strings and recompiling the game, and programmers don't need to
worry about the specifics of how to translate things. Now it's split
into README-translators.txt and README-programmers.txt.
I would, of course, recommend translators to translate the roomnames
while playing the full game (optionally in invincibility) so they can
immediately get all the context and maybe the most inspiration. And if
you want to go back into a specific level, then there's always the time
trials and intermission replays which will give you full coverage of
all the room names.
However, the time trials weren't really made for room name translation.
They have some annoying features like the instant restart when you
press ENTER at the wrong time, they remove context clues like
teleporters and companions, but the worst problem is that the last room
in a level is often completely untranslatable inside the time trials
because you immediately get sent to the results screen...
So, I added a new menu in the translator options, "explore game", which
gives you access to all the time trials and the two intermissions, from
the same menu. All these time trials (which they're still based off of,
under the hood) are stripped of the annoying features that come with
time trials. These are the changes I made to time trial behavior in
translator exploring mode:
- No 3-2-1-Go! countdown
- No on-screen time/death/shiny/par
- ENTER doesn't restart, and the map menu works. The entire map is also
revealed.
- Prize for the Reckless is in its normal form
- The teleporters in Entanglement Generator, Wheeler's Wormhole and
Level Complete are restored as context for room names (actually, we
should probably restore them in time trials anyway? Their "press to
teleport" prompt is already blocked out in time trials and they do
nothing other than being a checkpoint. I guess the reason they were
removed was to stop people from opening the teleporter menu when that
was not specifically blocked out in time trials yet.)
- The companions are there at the end of levels, and behave like in no
death mode (become happy and follow you to the teleporter). Also for
context.
- At the end of each level, you're not suddenly sent to the menu, but
you can use the teleporter at your leisure just like in the
intermission replays. In the Final Level, you do get sent to the menu
automatically, but after a longer delay.
I made another mark on VVVVVV: don't be startled, I added gamestates.
I wanted all teleporters at the end of levels to behave like the ones
at the end of the intermission replays, and all handling for
teleporting with specific companions is already done in gamestates, so
rather than adding conditional blocks across 5 or so different
gamestates, it made more sense to make a single gamestate for
"teleporting in translator exploring mode" (3090). I also added an
alternative to having to use gamestate 3500 or 82 for the end of the
final level: 3091-3092.
One other thing I want to add to the "explore game" menu: a per-level
count of how many room names are left to translate. That shouldn't be
too difficult, and I'm planning that for the next commit.
