tolsen64 on 9/6/2011 at 05:17
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
And you have at least two different sorts of readme files (GL-ready and DL-ready), so there has to be some amount of intelligence inside the program even if you won't see it in the end as a user.
This is the one thing I struggle with. Trying to decipher all the txt, htm, rtf, wri and whatever other documents that appear in a mission file. They all have different filenames, and the text inside them are different.
I'd like to see a standard file name and file type. At first I was thinking xml but then the loader would have to handle the font and such. I'm more inclined to see an html file as the standard for mission info files. "MissionInfo.html" would work nicely. There's lots of WYSIWYG HTML editors out there that mission authors could use. They could format the text, embed pictures, etc. All the loader would need to do is look for the "MissionInfo.html" file and load it into a WebBrowser component.
That's my $.02 worth...
Beleg Cúthalion on 9/6/2011 at 12:18
We were in fact trying to set up a new standard for GL but that doesn't free you from the necessity to handle all the existing file types. The GL readme is html AFAIK and it's rather useful IMHO (although it doesn't – yet – support multiple languages), so maybe one could start from this point.
As for the language handling in general: TDS isn't a problem since all language tags, if existant in the first place, are in one file for the corresponding readable, the game chooses the appropriate language according to the settings in Default.ini. However, if these language tags are missing, the player won't see anything (especially with the objectives it gives the well known "only visible checkboxes" bug, which by the way can have the reason of the missing patched T3Main.exe, too IIRC). That's why we had planned a little tool which hacks these files and copies the English text in all other tags without content to provide at least some langauge support (especially since my attempt to include translations in already released T3 missions failed for several reasons).
About T1/2 you might read this: (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122883&p=1767042)
(
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101241&p=1749200&viewfull=1#post1749200), the language discussion starts at the middle of page 25. I don't know of all of what we planned and tested back then is written in the forum, but I don't have any private messages left.
snobel on 10/6/2011 at 20:59
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
We were in fact trying to set up a new standard for GL but that doesn't free you from the necessity to handle all the existing file types. The GL readme is html AFAIK and it's rather useful IMHO (although it doesn't – yet – support multiple languages), so maybe one could start from this point.
GL uses its own special markup language, it seems. Something standard would be preferable. As for language support, maybe It's more practical in this case to have english.html, german.html etc, instead of one multi-language file?
Quote:
That's why we had planned a little tool which hacks these files and copies the English text in all other tags without content to provide at least some langauge support
You mean searching for files containing "lang_english", where the matching "lang_german" etc entries are missing or empty, and copying the English entry? The loader could do that as part of the installation process. Or (easier) the loader could just switch the game to English for that mission if such a file is found.
What exactly are conversations? I noticed that .con files contain text in a weird format.
Thanks for the links. I'm away this weekend, but I'll look into it next week.
