Topic: Content and looks of the new "cheap in-game help"

You're right about the "off topic". I have misused this thread a bit as a "Memo" for thoughts that came while doing the help text, but they really should be somewhere else. Crosspost?

Venatrix, about font attributes and formatting option to use, please decide that for yourself and feel free to modify any layout properties as seems best to you. I have no clear notion about the consequences for translation - so it's all just a suggestion, and the final decision is up to you.

All of this, plus the "in depth" stuff will have to be reviewed later, hopefully with a more complete set of formatting option. The way I understood Sirver, we are now doing a sort of skeleton to include an in-game help feature , albeit not for all buildings, into build 17. We want to raise more feedback on this to decide about the details. In the course of this, there will certainly be discussions about the content, too.

The question is: Shall I continue in this way or shall I give the translators more work but in return whole phrases?

In my experience, whole phrases (and in their proper context, too) are the only unities that can be translated. Any translation worth doing, (and reading!) will have consider the context. That is just how genuine language works. As soon as you start writing a prose text, you have to rephrase things on a phrase level - sometimes even paragraph level. An automated translation engine giving acceptable results would be a project of its own, probably supassing WL in its complexity.
It is different of course with things like tables, lists, ToC and so on. for these things you can do a word by word translation and get away with it. So, my answer would be, that for the terse, table-like enumerations on the "at a glance" side, we could mostly go "word by word", but will already need a few inserted sentences translated as a whole.

As for carrying similar criteria, even when they don't make sense (n/a), I remember an argument, that knowing where a particular information would have to be within the help window, can help the users to quickly find their way in a inevitably scrollable window. So, yes, I think on the "at a glance" side at least, we should strive for a uniform set of such criteria to allow for a better orientation. I hope I have found all of those already, and we won't need additional ones for buildings to come (seafaring?). But having them all inside each help text in a uniform sequence does not mean, that there cannot be additional info for each building, inserted in between them.

EDIT: If you feel that the headline is unnecessary, just skip it. I'd rather leave it in while doing the text, because I don't have a window title then

What's your opinion on these matters?

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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alocritani wrote:

@Venatrix: I think that keeping "pieces" of text translatable separately can help a lot the translation process; lot of terms will be already translated. Just to explain, I've used your help.lua files on my italian version of Widelands and lot of terms (miners, buildings, etc) appeared in Italian.

Yes, my Widelands is German. That’s how I can see, I have written the words correctly.

This will speed up the translation process enormously-

I hope so, too.

On the other side, if what Sirver said here is not obsolete, we have to remember that maybe in future we could keep the lore part for the help but use some auto-generated part for the summaries (workers, chain of wares, etc...)

We will see what the future brings.

Two is the oddest prime.

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I don’t worry about the lore section. I’m sure the translators can handle this.

But I see a problem in some parts with the splitting that I want to point out.

For example the Incoming of War Mill and Axefactory: I splitted it into "Provided from the " and the name of the corresponding building. That may be fine in English, but at least in German (and I suppose other languages, too) the buildings have different genders with different articles that have to be used. So the example can be translated with "Hergestellt von der " (feminine) or "Hergestellt vom " (masculine and neuter). Either I split it in another way (I was thinking about rephrasing this part anyway) or don’t split it at all. I think I go the first way.

Astuur wrote:

Is there anything you'd want me to do in a different fashion, that would make you task easier?

Yes, one thing: Can you please write in the ascii-files the number of materials needed and just ones the path to the corresponding picture? Then I don’t have to count them. Oh, and there is no need to write the arrow-right.png in between, the arrows are set by the function.

Two is the oddest prime.

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You can always download the files manually from the branch and put them in. There’s no need to compile it with them.

Two is the oddest prime.

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I think only the AI makes use of this.
So Peter may be the best person to ask.

I have seen AI driven Barbarians build Ferneries like crazy
in some games; so it may be a non-trivial decision.

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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