Language errors in-game

Hey all! This is kind of a bug report I guess, but “bug” sounds more like something that’s wrong with the game itself somehow, but it’s debatable I guess. Anyway, I found a few language errors in the game, and I thought this could be a thread where not just I but other players as well share any that they find, to help the developers fix these.

I’ve found these so far:

There’s a couple errors in this one. First, there’s a period followed by a colon. Second, there is no clear distinction between speech and description, so it sounds like he’s referring to himself third person as “The traveller” (I happen to like styles of punctuation such as in The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (unrelated to the film featuring Tom Cruise) where there are no quotation marks and such, but for this kind of a game I think clarity is desirable). Third, “3 Basket of Berries(s)” just is all sorts of wrong, in all honesty.


Actually not sure if this one is an error, but it looks like it says “wouldnit”. It doesn’t actually, because it’s slightly different from the actual “i”, but it definitely doesn’t quite look like an apostrophe. Just thought I’d add it, and then the developers can decide whether they think it’s fine as is.

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good catch! I think perhaps the dialogues should be formatted as such, with the “spoken” portion in quotes?

A traveler approaches holding a bundle: "Goodness, you people look starved!" The traveler would like to leave you 3 Basket of Berries.
Eyla Nelvin: "I wonder if I could get out of chopping wood by pretending to have a splinter? Oh right, it wouldn't be pretending."

That would probably be the easiest fix for the first one, and then for consistency it should probably be done for the others as well, even if it’s all spoken. Also, the ideal would be if Basket could be pluralized if there are more than one.

true, but I can see the how this is being generated… the berries are an object, with an object-name of “Basket of Berries”, which is used for all situations when the berries are being referenced…

you can certainly account for pluralization, but if you think about the basket of berries as one “thing”, it makes more sense, even if the tense is off in a given sentence…

The traveler would like to leave you 3 Wood Blocks.
The traveler would like to leave you 1 Wood Blocks.
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True enough, I thought the same thing. I guess the only true solution is giving items both a singular and a plural name (or maybe only items where there is a plural other than just adding an “s” at the end, and then having it append the “s” if there is no explicit plural name given). Could still be worthwhile, it’s those little things that matter I think. (Particularly grammar nazis knights like myself would be appreciative, I imagine.) You’d also be able to make other non-standard plurals easily that way (e.g., sheep).

If “basket of berries” were lexicalized as a single item, it would indeed make sense to pluralize it at the end, although it probably still would become “3 basket of berries’” (with an apostrophe rather than an extra “s”) :smiley:

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And that’s only english ‘language errors’… I wonder how much there will be for example in polish xD

Hmmm… how about a special character which could activate plural end when it would be necessary? Well… it could also help in other languages.

Example 1:[quote]Language: english
character used as 'pluralization place [xd] ': ^
character used as 'exception [xd] ': %
1: " "
2+, -y,: "-ies"
2+, -o, !-%: "es"
2+: “s”

Basket^ of berries
1 Basket of berries
3 Baskets of berries[/quote]

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Totally agree with @phoriist . The game is going to be translated to many languages, and each of them has different ways to build the plural forms. (As far as I know, German has like 6 different ways of plurals, or more).

There should be a way to let other languages write their plurals.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind the (s) way. Or directly 1 Wood Blocks, as @SteveAdamo suggested.

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Well, I’ve been doing just this sort of thing for the little script I wrote to generate random cave names for Minecraft (to put on signs near the entrances and inside it for given chambers or corridors; you get names like

The Coves of the Lightning
The Ailuirine Rock Shelter Where You Knit
The Dungeon of the Weeds
Strength Hallways
Divot Where I Baned
The Mad Burrows of Apian Metal
Eager Economics Passageway
The Rad Pits Where the Ports Cure
The Old Excavations Where Weird Outriggers Are Hovering
The Damp Depressions Where the Grungy Question Drags

you can see how some of them won’t actually fit on signs, but what can you do). Indeed, you can hardcode some of the common rules in, and I have rules like,

  • If the singular ends in “y” (to catch “cemetery”) and the second-to-last letter is not “e”, “a”, “o” or “u” (to skip words like “boy”), replace “y” with “ies” for plural;
  • If the singular ends in “x”, “s”, or “h” preceded by “s” or “c” (to catch “marsh” but skip “growth” or “pharaoh”), add “es” for plural;
  • Otherwise just add “s”.

(I may need to include the ‘end in o, add “es”’ rule, although I expect it too will have exceptions.)

And you can indeed catch a lot of things that way, but you still have a bunch of exceptions that cannot be reasonably hardcoded and need to instead be explicitly listed. Some examples:

  • Words that have a plural identical to their singular: “anime”, “apparatus”, “asparagus”, “sheep”
  • Words that have a different plural but in unexpected ways: “appendix”, “aquarius”, “aries”, “goose”

But you can catch most things with a few simple rules, and then you can just code in the exceptions manually. That’s how I have it done: if there’s no plural given, it uses the morphological rules given; if there is, that overrides the rules.

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Honestly, we should use your name generator. A few of these are awesome.

I’m all for Port Curing Rad Pits.

Lost it at this one.

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Hehe, thanks! Well, I could put it online somewhere, I suppose. If you’re really interested, let me know.

EDIT: Okay, I put it online. It’s a rar of the entire folder as I copied it from my Eclipse workspace, and it uses Java. I use Windows as an OS, not sure if that matters. Please keep in mind there may be some errors still in there (conjugation exceptions I have yet to catch, etc.), and there is a disproportionate number of obscure adjectives meaning “of or pertaining to [some animal]”, as I went over the Wikipedia list of animal names.

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Another instance where this might be good is in the scenario messages when a traveler wants to join your town (and perhaps similar messages). 15:30 in the video.

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Perhaps not the most pressing one, as it’s temporary text anyway, but interesting was misspelled as *interseting, in the map selection screen when starting a new game. 0:16 in the video.

Bumping with another bug:

I think most items referred to in-game could use a text field or two to use in such sentences (eg “A Turnip; turnip; turnips” for name - singular - plural).

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Exactly, that’s the sort of thing we were talking about earlier in the topic. I agree.

So this time, it looks like the tags (in this case, recent_food and teacher) somehow couldn’t be retrieved and thus are shown as “???”. Mind you, the teacher tag is shown correctly in some of the notices.

And of course, there’s the “this A Turnip” issue again.

Saw the last problem again in R118.

34:20.

Not entirely sure, but shouldn’t “Hunk 'o Stone” be “Hunk o’ Stone”?

Also there still are the aforementioned punctuation quote issues, e.g. “A goblin is stealing your stuff!: Nobody mind me take this, yah? --Olgi the Flange”. 7:27 in the video.

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Each item should have a singular and a plural form. Then we need a function sort of like this pseudocode.

string ToString(int Amount, item ItemToConvert)
{
    if( Amount == 1 ) { return ItemToConvert.SingularName; }
    return Amount.ToString() + ItemToConvert.PluralName;
}
The only problem is, this means changing every item, and this extra function will almost always (whenever there isn’t exactly one item) output the plural version every time the item name needs to be displayed. I realize right now new features are more important, but fixing this would give us some peace of mind… also, the earlier a system like this is implemented, the less code will have to be changed for it! A function for doing this would also be good, as it could turn 1 Turnip into A Turnip (without displaying A Turnip in places like the journal that will never show plural food items) and 1 Oak Log into An Oak Log if those are set as the singular form.

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Needs more than just that:

“A plate of berries” … sure would be nice to eat right about now.
I think I will eat “a plate of berries”.
We have too many “plates of berries” in this village!
“Plates of berries” everywhere! Aaah!
This “plate of berries” talk is getting tedious now.
“Plate of berries” for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Cid help us…

I think that’s enough to cover all the usual sentence constructions with grammatically correct English. Lot of work though…

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Well, capitalization could be done by code regularly. And then you could implement basic morphological rules with only exceptions hard-coded, as suggested above. Might be doable, then.

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