Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Improving wesnoth ingame-help

[ott]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 05:33:57PM -0600, Richard Kettering wrote:
> Personally, I think most of our descriptions are terrible.  I would 
> jump at the chance to make really nice, new ones, and could probably 
> grab a friend or two from my college to help.

Judging by the recent Undead descriptions that you have done, this would
be a worthwhile exercise!  Right now your new descriptions stand out,
with a serious high Gothic tone, compared to a breathless look-at-me
tone of some of the existing ones.  Certainly for the Undead it would
be nice to propagate the tone of the descriptions you have already done
to other units.

Overall, though, I am not all that unhappy with the existing descriptions.
The real problem for me is lack of coherence -- each race should probably
have descriptions that carry a specific, consistent tone.  To me this
would help lift the quality of the text in the game from acceptable
but purely functional to being an exciting part of the game experience.
This can only be achieved by individual editorial oversight, I think.
I propose Jetryl oversees descriptions for the Undead, to start with.
Chunking revisions to one group of units at a time would make life easier
for translators, too, and would make it easier to split the task also.

> I think it would be worth it though.  Our current ones are almost 
> infantile, and are often written with incorrect grammar.

Some of the descriptions may be awful, but personally I've worked
hard since 0.8.9 to find and report egregious errors of grammar.
lynxlynxlynx and mpolo have also picked up many errors.  Shade, sanna and
turin have all been kept busy fixing this stream of text glitch reports.
A lot of informal phrasing does remain, but please have another look at
the offending descriptions (or the cvs changelogs) before making such
dismissive comments.

My priority has been to avoid breaking translations wholesale while
ensuring an acceptable level of grammar and style.  My aim was to help
standardise English usage so an en_GB (or en_US) translation made sense.
It now would be great to start revising descriptions (and strings,
in general) for style.

> Amusingly enough, they are probably a lot better sounding in the 
> translated versions, since a native speaker of the language was 
> guaranteed to have written them.

Yes -- even in en_GB I couldn't resist changing a few phrasings that I
thought were just too much to bear...

> I would like some means of having more generally wesnoth-centric unit 
> descriptions, allowing us to add more dimension to our currently rather 
> shallow fantasy world.

Perhaps start by writing a wiki page on proposed description standards:

- keep time out of the descriptions, they should apply to any period in
Wesnoth history (link to WesnothHistory)
- be careful about referencing WesnothGeography, since units may be
useful in other contexts; preferably make references to geography
sufficiently vague that the unit can be used in a campaign set in a
different part of the Wesnoth world
- for Undead, keep to a Gothic style (see [list of authors for examples
of the style])
- for Humans, ...

> Yes - we should provide generalized descriptions of each terrain's 
> effect on different classes of units.  For example, we should, in the 
> forest terrain, state that elves move and defend very well in forest, 
> and that other units find themselves slowed by it. (actually, a much 
> more in depth description covering all of the races, but this was a 
> short example).

It might also be worth doing detailed unit cross-tables for inclusion with
the in-game documentation (or at least on the Wiki).  A more prominent
reference to the existing unit vs unit calculator could also help.
My dr script does some generation of cross-tables, by trawling through
.cfg files looking for unit stats, although it is aimed mostly at
damage tables currently (dr stands for Damage Reporter).  I'd be happy
to modify dr to generate more cross-tables, suggestions for what output
should look like would be appreciated.

For reference, one of the cross-tables currently generated by dr looks
like:

Resistances

movetype         b   c   f   h   i   p
--------------------------------------
armoredfoot     50 120 110  80  70  60
deepsea         80  40 100  80  70 100
drakefly        90 150  50  80  80 110
[...]

although most of the output consists of damage tables of the form

blade 4-4: Fencer

against        -25   0  25  50  75 100
--------------------------------------
armoredfoot      2   2   3   3   4   4 <-   1.50
deepsea          2   3   4   5   6   6 <-   2.00
drakefly         3   4   4   5   6   7 <-   1.33
[...]

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