"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.
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.
