Thursday, May 3, 2012

Translation system fix and preparing the story characters.

Hi all! :)

Everything is in the title:
I fixed the translation system yesterday, making the boot menu option texts reload when changing the game language.
For those using CMake, the mo files are auto copied upon po file modification in the local (testing) translation location, so you can directly see in game what you've just translated by making modifications to the po file and typing 'make'.
Here is an example:
The menu, in French.
We also discussed the beginning of the story yesterday and I started to revamp the characters' sprites data accordingly.
Most notably, Claudius portrait will be renamed Thanis and be used with the former Kyle sprite, which will kinda stay the Hero's rival in the story.

Warning dev notes below!

Last but not least, I've been lurking in the darkness of the scripting system, most importantly in the event supervisor, to look after possible scripting simplifications: (I've also put the end notes about it here for further self-reference, I must admit :])
- I first removed the need of event id, making the system auto-using the object pointer as reference internally.
On the user-side, it first came as a brilliant idea for simple cases, but had many flaws (and it was already a lot of work just to test it.) For instance, I had to declare the event chains in the reverse order, which is very confusing.
- I also looked at integrating functions that auto-create the event needed in the object. Again, nice for simple cases, but horrible for advanced scripting.

I then fell on the conclusion that even if the event id use was not optimal, it was necessary for not too uncommon cases. I also learned where a simple case is and where it is not, and I might add some shortcuts functions later, trying to simplify simple npc creation.
As the use of Integer id for events is simply hard to carry, I fell on the simple fact that it could be changed to string based ids. After all, it's not more error-prone than integer, and can be used in a more readable way, IMO.

Now it's settled, the next story update should come rather soon.

Best regards,

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