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)
The main issue was mostly that we have to build C files as C++ in some
cases, and extern "C" wasn't being used everywhere, so linker errors
popped up. The rest is the usual tedious VS2010 stuff like casting void*
to other stuff, so this commit as a whole is pretty boring!
This replaces all calls to SDL_free with a new macro, VVV_free, that
nulls the pointer afterwards. This mitigates any use-after-frees and
also completely eliminates double-frees. The same is done for any
function to free specific objects such as SDL_FreeSurface, with the
VVV_freefunc macro.
No exceptions for any of these calls, even if the pointer is discarded
or zeroed afterwards anyway. Better safe than sorry.
This is a macro rather than a function that takes in a
pointer-to-pointer because such a function would have type issues that
require casting and that's just not safe.
Even though SDL_free and other SDL functions already check for NULL, the
macro has a NULL check for other functions that don't. For example,
FAudioVoice_DestroyVoice does not check for NULL.
FILESYSTEM_freeMemory has been axed in favor of VVV_free because it
functionally does the same thing except for `unsigned char*` only.
This commit adds a new string formatting system to replace uses of
`SDL_snprintf` and string concatenation.
Making our own string formatting system has been briefly discussed
during the review of the localization branch, and on the VVVVVV
Discord. It's inspired by Python's format strings, but simpler.
This is primarily to benefit localization - strings will be easier to
understand (`Now using %s Tileset` → `Now using {area} Tileset`,
`"%s remain"` → `"{n_crewmates|wordy} remain"`), translators can change
the word order for their language's grammar (`%1$s` is a POSIX
extension), and this system is also less error-prone (making the format
string not align with the actual arguments won't result in a crash or
UB).
It also integrates our needs better - particularly the "wordy" numbers
without having to have a `help.number_words(n).c_str()` at the
callsite, translators can opt in and out of wordy numbers per string,
and this should also make it easier to solve #859.
This commit adds the formatting system itself, and changes one
`SDL_snprintf` in the code to use it as a small demo (the rest should
probably be done in the localization branch to avoid more unneeded
work).
The system is described in full detail in VFormat.h and in the pull
request description.
