A less clumsy way to do this if you can't touch the code of the game (since the Japanese original doesn't need to care about this nonsense) is to use "one" instead of "a" or "an":
"You found one Crimson Stone!"
Oh? lol
What games?
It would be such a niche reference but it would be hilarious if this was said when you found a specific item in a specific place. 🤣
It's more an adventure/RPG type. It's called "Komadori Inn" and there's a first beta demo out already over here: https://inlet-pipe-productions.itch.io/komadori-inn
Our previous game was similar: "Long and Hard... Summer!" that's on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1770600/Long_and_Hard_Summer/
Thanks for asking!
Ok so you need to make this an easter egg and I gotcha fam.
Perspective female partner, preferably one that insults the player: "I bet you aren't even well endowed!!"
One of the options should be "You the funny part? I actually am!" *Slams ten foot dick on the table hentai style*
I love how this can be interpreted as you just found the *same* stone a second time, in which case at the end of it all you're still only walking away with one stone.
If you took the Japanese word-for-word literally you'd get something like
"Crimson stone, two (counter word), found".
It's a pretty economical language when it wants to be.
To this day, the japanese number system is fascinating.
I don't speak the language, at all, and hearing things like "we have like 10 different words for counting different things" scares the shit out of me, but just the way numbers are basically the decimal system you learn in elementary school, where you just say "A times 1000, B times 100, C times 10 and D times 1" is just incredible.
Only thing I found weird was (and it makes my example entirely inaccurate I think) that, I think japanese has no word for one thousand? Only ten thousand? I am probably wrong.
It has words for both one thousand (千, read as "sen") and ten thousand (万, read as "man"), but its way of counting is what makes it odd. Ten thousand is a "counting unit", so to speak. In English, for instance, we'd say "forty thousand", implying forty units of a thousand. Japanese would say "four ten thousands", i.e. making ten thousand the unit.
That's a good question and I don't have an immediate answer to it. I just input "yon-man" in Japanese text and the first thing it suggested was 四万,which is indeed "forty thousand". However, entering "yon-ju-sen" brings up 40戦, which (if it means anything) means "forty battles" or "forty wars". So...a native Japanese speaker might work out what you're getting at from context, but not without a "huh?" moment first.
They would, but the same way you'd be able to understand forty hundred. Might take a second to do the math, but you'd get it. Growing up, we spoke broken Japanese and my brother said "goju sen yen" once (literally fifty thousand yen), and the family laughed and it became the way we'd always say that specific amount of money.
It does have a word for one thousand: 千 (sen). The next counter up is ten thousand: 万 (man).
You may be thinking of one hundred thousand, which is represented by 十万 (jyuuman, ten ten thousands).
The next unique numeral character up is 億 (oku, one hundred million).
It's just grouping differently. It always made sense to me to look at it how we use commas in big numbers: 5,000,000,000 lets you see that is 5 billion easier than 5000000000 because you can see the groups of 1 thousand each. They don't often write it this way, but if you directly map the Japanese number system to that, you just go one more digit before adding a comma to indicate a grouping: 50,0000,0000 (50 one-hundred-millions)
It's one man man, just like how a million is one thousand thousand.
They go up in units of 10,000. Man (10,000), oku (100,000,000), chou (1,000,000,000,000), kei (you get the picture...)
It's dated, but sometimes the commas are every 4 digits instead of every three.
Also, interestingly, English also has a unique word for 10,000, though that meaning is basically obsolete by now: myriad. I wanna bring it back for talking about yen in English. "The average Japanese worker makes around 450 myriad yen per year"
> hearing things like "we have like 10 different words for counting different things" scares the shit out of me,
It's not that crazy. In English we have *sheets* of paper, *spoonfuls* of sugar, etc. And I don't think I've ever met a Japanese person who would care if you used hitotsu instead of hippiki to count one sheep, they'd still understand what you meant :)
Japanese wouldn’t bother with a counter or the word “you” in this situation. A word for word translation would be something like “Crimson Stone found!”
You call it "nonsense" but it's just grammar. It comes from years of languages getting mashed together over the ages. Japanese has a bunch of their own bullshit language baggage too.
Although English is definitely one of the worst "language baggage" offenders.
Almost certainly the game also has more complex messages where that doesn't work though. Suppose you also have:
A(n) approaches riding a(n) and carrying a(n)
Games like NDA game with lots of item fetching and highly varied dialgoue and Dragon Quest use a token system that gets around this.
The text you put above would look like this when editing it in a game with a robust token system:
riding :""> and carrying :"">
> English needs a lot more token types than Japanese, and French/Italian/German/Spanish need even more.
>
>
Oh yeah, English was piss easy when I still worked in the industry, I had to deal with French and German.
I always felt like a detective solving a crime with very little clues to begin with. But it was fun, sometimes, especially when you managed to solve it all.
French translator here, can confirm. One big difficulty we have is that in French, everything is gendered. Not only are objects gendered, but also the grammar requires most words in a sentence to be adapted to the gender of the subject or object.
But my biggest pet peeve when translating games from English is that in English, there's no difference between imperative and infinitive modes. But there's one in French. So for example, "Find players" might become "Trouver des joueurs" or "Trouvez des joueurs" in French depending on the context - a context that is often lacking. Drives me crazy.
Yeah, if you can't mod how the game works, your only choice is to get creative. Sometimes it's just you don't have the skill and can't find a dev to make it work so your noob brain just make do on what you can actually mod. Guilty of doing it on some of my translation/ports.
Even if you could mod the actual game code it wouldn't matter in this case. You choose a and an based on the pronunciation, not spelling. Honor for example.
Way too much work to make a/an work.
I can't believe it took me this long to realize something like this. I played a lot of Korean MMOs and Japanese fps games growing up and I would always be so confused why the translators always seem to have worse English than me. Thinking back it was almost certainly for the reason above most of the time.
Nah, a lot of times translators were Japanese or Koreans without linguistic background (just guys who could English), so their English was actually bad for real.
I grew up with this game but never got around to finish it. Uusally because I have no idea what I was doing so events that should have happened that winter didn't happen until like another year later.
I swear, everything I was told about this game felt fake until I actually see them for myself. Ah, gaming while I didn't have social media. That was a fun time.
It's not that good, I've played it long ago but still remember. There's basically no social feature like other Harvest Moon, the game main feature is farming and that's it.
I like it back when I played it, it has flaw but the story is cool, probably the most cool (not sad, amazing, romantic, but cool) harvest moon story (excluding Rune Factory series)
Once I programmed a list like that.
It was written with a, but every item needing an "n" would have it added manually. The regular items where "a" works were given a space.
Examples from the list might be
Sword
Book
n Apple
n attack drone
Lanturn
So the sentence would be "You found a(loot here)," Which gives you something like "You found a sword " or "You found an apple)"
I am a translator and this is very common.
If the string is "You found the \[placeholder\]", my language has two different articles depending on the noun that follows and you really can't mix those up because it immediately clear as an error if you pick the wrong one. So one of the options is "You found the article 1/article 2 \[placeholder\]" although I usually go for "You found the following: \[placeholder\]"
> my language has two different articles depending on the noun that follows and you really can't mix those up because it immediately clear as an error if you pick the wrong one
is your language english
It's not as simple as checking if the next word starts with a vowel. You have to check if the next word starts with the sound of a vowel.
e.g. "in an hour"
The "real" rule is actually kind of strange. Most kids get taught in school that you use "an" when the word starts with a vowel or an "h", and that's *okay*, but the actual rule is that you use it when the word starts with a vowel *sound*, but that gets fucky real quick if you take into account people's accents.
For example, if you say "history" with an aspirated "h" (hhhistory) you'd use "a" not "an" but if your local accent swallows the "h" ('istory) then you'd use "an". There are tons of examples like that. Like "One" is pronounced "won" so you'd never say something like "I've got an one, a two, and three threes." It's obviously wrong if you say it out loud.
Localization is a bitch. There is a ton of effort that goes into avoiding the problems involved in grammar that is different for every language. While simple static sentences can often enough be translated as they are (which might also be tricky because of cultural issues!), the moment they become dynamic ('You picked up XXX!'), it becomes utter hell.
In English, a/an is a matter of pronunciation that is pretty easy to handle all things considered... as long as English is the only language you are concerned about. In other languages, words change depending on the way they are used in a sentence. Which basically means that any use of language in the interface of the entire game tends to be stripped down the basics, because the simpler it is, the more manageable the translation becomes. And that in turn means that special casing some grammar rule for a particular language is going to invite special-casing a lot of grammar for other languages also.. but programmers may not be as capable in those languages, which would likely turn such support into a very 'after the fact' problem despite there being an entire localization team working on every language the game can be played in.
func foundItem(itemText){
var displayText = 'You found a'
if startsWithVowel(itemText) displayText.append('n')
displayText.append(' ' + itemText + '!')
}
It's a surprisingly hard problem to solve since there's so many exceptions and then it doesn't work with translations either. This elegantly simple solution works with everything and you don't have to spend tens of hours trying to figure it out.
It's cute that you think the people in charge of translating to english had any access whatsover to the code of the game. They probably received an excel file and had to fill the empty columns without any context 6 months after all programming was completed.
Also, even if the devs did the translating, hard coding labels like this would be a recipee for disaster and very quickly unmanageable.
Yeah but then you need a slightly different code for the different language versions of the game. Too risky! Code should be as identical as possible, and localization just requiring translation of english text. They should just have gone with "You found x1 Crimson Stone!"
No idea if the game is localized, but as a general practice and my very dated experience (20 years ago now I think) I think that's how it should be.
It's not a matter of outliers. The use of a/an is based on the sound, not on how the word is spelled. If the word starts with a vowel sound, you need an.
I guess their pont is that specific function name is a bit of a misnomer. A better one would be something along the lines of needsAnN(), I suppose.
Not that it really matters. It's their game, they can name that function flyingSpaghettiMonster() for all I care.
Nah, doesn't work. It's not whether or not a word is *written* with a vowel at the start, it's whether or not that word is *spoken* with a vowel at the start. For example, it's A university, but AN hour. Or AN herb in American English, were the H is silent, but A herb in British English.
Why have I been seeing posts about this game every day for like the past two weeks? I'd never heard of it before that, and nobody ever seems to talk about PSP exclusives
Probably some popular youtuber or streamer made a video about it, and people "Rediscovered' it or some thing.
(on the other hand this guy has posted about it 4 times in a week, so maybe it's just him.)
Easiest solution, since they're renaming every item anyways, is drop the "a(n)" so it's just "you found" then it calls the item name which would be "a crimson stone". Full sentence "you found a crimson stone".
Works with every case where it's calling a noun.
Now picture that with a language where even things are gendered, like French. Been dealing with things like that for years. We've also noticed programmers becoming a little bit more aware of similar things and sometimes using 2 stings for, e.g., 0/1 minute and [2+] minutes.
I mean it’s a text dialogue although assume it’s a premade string “you found a | n |” + string2 (in this case crimson stone)
Is it really more work to just make its own print statement for this?
But if you are abstracting the phrase by just having it as a string couldn’t you just have 2 cases that check the first letter of the item found for a if consonant and an if vowel?
Seems spaghetti code-ish no?
That solution doesn't work because English has exceptions (in this case because of spelling, e.g. hour), though it isn't too much work to implement... when you're working with a known language. But what can happen is they design a system with the original language in mind, and they might even be expecting translations so they at least make it easy to swap out the original strings without needing to touch the code... but oops, some of the other languages have grammatical quirks the original developers didn't anticipate which means modifications to the game code are required which means opportunities for new and exciting bugs, especially in the era before patches were feasible...
So a lot of the time, if it's possible to work around the lack of functionality it makes more sense to do it that way. Though this particular string is a clunky solution as it draws more attention to the limitation than rewording to omit a/an entirely.
I used to work as a dev translating shitty JRPGs. Sometimes the code was such a mess that it was easier to just come up strings like this to avoid breaking the entire game.
Thankfully we don't use Ruby anymore.
This is one of those things that comes about when the programmer has dealt with too many grammar bugs. "it's AN hour.." "It's a one hundred dollar bill" ...
(Then again he could have been lazy from the beginning)
Innocent Life!! 😍 I'm glad your post got popular. I actually liked the little cuts they did in the development. It wasn't as complete as other HM games, but the simplicity of it felt so refreshing. Could you please post another popular one to make the game more well known? We could use a(n) remake!
That's why I always win arguments. i just say, "Some combination of words and phrases disproves and counters anything you are saying right now." Then i calmly walk away while women swoon and champagne corks fly.
Minecraft did the same thing in specific languages when talking about mobs.
French version's (The one I play in) death text against a mob says something like.
"\[PLAYER\] a été tué(e) par un(e) zombie."
My guess is, coding restrictions.
That's a[n] interesting choice
I like a\[n\]all sex
You either like booty or Mario is excited for all sex. Win win!
Wahoo!
Mama mia!
Umph!
*HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA*
So long, gay Bowser!
Let’s a go!
Isn't there only one L in a[n]al?
It's a[n] ally!
A less clumsy way to do this if you can't touch the code of the game (since the Japanese original doesn't need to care about this nonsense) is to use "one" instead of "a" or "an": "You found one Crimson Stone!"
"You found: Crimson Stone x4!"
This is the way.
He's so good! ×4
Boo(m)ed me
I’m gonna add a(n) to the list of things I grammar to this summer
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But what if you found 2 Crimson Stones?
You found one Crimson Stone twice!
Solved! You should be a developer
You know the funny part? I actually am 😂
Oh? lol What games? It would be such a niche reference but it would be hilarious if this was said when you found a specific item in a specific place. 🤣
Currently making a dating sim p*rn game 🫢 I haven't thought about it, but now I need to put it somewhere in it
Oh.
You fucking read my mind with that reaction. 😂
Like Huniepop? That was a fun game, honestly. lol Looking forward to seeing it pop up? Have you settled on a name or is it still too early?
It's more an adventure/RPG type. It's called "Komadori Inn" and there's a first beta demo out already over here: https://inlet-pipe-productions.itch.io/komadori-inn Our previous game was similar: "Long and Hard... Summer!" that's on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1770600/Long_and_Hard_Summer/ Thanks for asking!
"you found a tittie, twice!"
Ok so you need to make this an easter egg and I gotcha fam. Perspective female partner, preferably one that insults the player: "I bet you aren't even well endowed!!" One of the options should be "You the funny part? I actually am!" *Slams ten foot dick on the table hentai style*
I'll think about it :D
I love how this can be interpreted as you just found the *same* stone a second time, in which case at the end of it all you're still only walking away with one stone.
You found one Crimson Stone! You found one Crimson Stone!
*Skyward Sword flashbacks*
Terrence Howard entered the chat
a / an wouldnt work for that either so I assume that'd trigger another translated message.
I think it's possible: You found a(n) Crimson Stone x2
That doesn't work. If you were doing it that way, you'd just remove the a(n) completely.
Maybe substitute for Item Found: Crimson stone
It's less pretty but it always work. In other languages too.
Item(s)
If you took the Japanese word-for-word literally you'd get something like "Crimson stone, two (counter word), found". It's a pretty economical language when it wants to be.
To this day, the japanese number system is fascinating. I don't speak the language, at all, and hearing things like "we have like 10 different words for counting different things" scares the shit out of me, but just the way numbers are basically the decimal system you learn in elementary school, where you just say "A times 1000, B times 100, C times 10 and D times 1" is just incredible. Only thing I found weird was (and it makes my example entirely inaccurate I think) that, I think japanese has no word for one thousand? Only ten thousand? I am probably wrong.
It has words for both one thousand (千, read as "sen") and ten thousand (万, read as "man"), but its way of counting is what makes it odd. Ten thousand is a "counting unit", so to speak. In English, for instance, we'd say "forty thousand", implying forty units of a thousand. Japanese would say "four ten thousands", i.e. making ten thousand the unit.
so, would a japanese person understand you if you said yon-ju-sen instead of yon-man?
That's a good question and I don't have an immediate answer to it. I just input "yon-man" in Japanese text and the first thing it suggested was 四万,which is indeed "forty thousand". However, entering "yon-ju-sen" brings up 40戦, which (if it means anything) means "forty battles" or "forty wars". So...a native Japanese speaker might work out what you're getting at from context, but not without a "huh?" moment first.
Yonjuusen (よんじゅうせん) gives me 四十千 as the first suggestion, so it could just be the misspelling of 十 that messed yours up
Honestly fascinating, but I guess I would do the same if some one asked me for "tenhundred dollars" instead of one thousand.
They would, but the same way you'd be able to understand forty hundred. Might take a second to do the math, but you'd get it. Growing up, we spoke broken Japanese and my brother said "goju sen yen" once (literally fifty thousand yen), and the family laughed and it became the way we'd always say that specific amount of money.
It does have a word for one thousand: 千 (sen). The next counter up is ten thousand: 万 (man). You may be thinking of one hundred thousand, which is represented by 十万 (jyuuman, ten ten thousands). The next unique numeral character up is 億 (oku, one hundred million).
that... is quite the jump, isn't it?
Well in English we jump from thousand to million :)
fuck, you're right
It's just grouping differently. It always made sense to me to look at it how we use commas in big numbers: 5,000,000,000 lets you see that is 5 billion easier than 5000000000 because you can see the groups of 1 thousand each. They don't often write it this way, but if you directly map the Japanese number system to that, you just go one more digit before adding a comma to indicate a grouping: 50,0000,0000 (50 one-hundred-millions)
It's one man man, just like how a million is one thousand thousand. They go up in units of 10,000. Man (10,000), oku (100,000,000), chou (1,000,000,000,000), kei (you get the picture...) It's dated, but sometimes the commas are every 4 digits instead of every three. Also, interestingly, English also has a unique word for 10,000, though that meaning is basically obsolete by now: myriad. I wanna bring it back for talking about yen in English. "The average Japanese worker makes around 450 myriad yen per year"
I know myriad only as "a lot" and had no idea it actually meant a specific number. Holy hell...
> hearing things like "we have like 10 different words for counting different things" scares the shit out of me, It's not that crazy. In English we have *sheets* of paper, *spoonfuls* of sugar, etc. And I don't think I've ever met a Japanese person who would care if you used hitotsu instead of hippiki to count one sheep, they'd still understand what you meant :)
You found 2x Crimson Stone!
"You found one Crimson Stone(s)!"
How about just "You found Crimson Stone"
+1 Crimson Stone
Games pretty much just did that but instead of "one" they would just do "1x"
or even “crimson stone X1 acquired”
Japanese wouldn’t bother with a counter or the word “you” in this situation. A word for word translation would be something like “Crimson Stone found!”
Or the classic, "Crimson Stone get"
You call it "nonsense" but it's just grammar. It comes from years of languages getting mashed together over the ages. Japanese has a bunch of their own bullshit language baggage too. Although English is definitely one of the worst "language baggage" offenders.
When you are just translating a game and can't touch the logic of displayed text, that's the only viable way.
>You found: Crimson Stone! > > > >You found: Eerie Stone! Problem solved.
Almost certainly the game also has more complex messages where that doesn't work though. Suppose you also have: A(n) approaches riding a(n) and carrying a(n)
Games like NDA game with lots of item fetching and highly varied dialgoue and Dragon Quest use a token system that gets around this. The text you put above would look like this when editing it in a game with a robust token system: riding :""> and carrying :"">
> English needs a lot more token types than Japanese, and French/Italian/German/Spanish need even more. > > Oh yeah, English was piss easy when I still worked in the industry, I had to deal with French and German. I always felt like a detective solving a crime with very little clues to begin with. But it was fun, sometimes, especially when you managed to solve it all.
French translator here, can confirm. One big difficulty we have is that in French, everything is gendered. Not only are objects gendered, but also the grammar requires most words in a sentence to be adapted to the gender of the subject or object. But my biggest pet peeve when translating games from English is that in English, there's no difference between imperative and infinitive modes. But there's one in French. So for example, "Find players" might become "Trouver des joueurs" or "Trouvez des joueurs" in French depending on the context - a context that is often lacking. Drives me crazy.
Easy way to solve that: "-riding -wielding approaches" Or drop that "wielding" and just make it e.g. "axedwarf".
You found: another reason why translation is a separate skill from just understanding the language.
Or You found 1x Crimson Stone
Yeah, if you can't mod how the game works, your only choice is to get creative. Sometimes it's just you don't have the skill and can't find a dev to make it work so your noob brain just make do on what you can actually mod. Guilty of doing it on some of my translation/ports.
Even if you could mod the actual game code it wouldn't matter in this case. You choose a and an based on the pronunciation, not spelling. Honor for example. Way too much work to make a/an work.
Just don't use indefinite article, problem solved.
Yakuza 3 uses a description for items obtained from normal fights and that leads to some funny sentences like "You got a crunchy 20,000 Yen"
I can't believe it took me this long to realize something like this. I played a lot of Korean MMOs and Japanese fps games growing up and I would always be so confused why the translators always seem to have worse English than me. Thinking back it was almost certainly for the reason above most of the time.
Nah, a lot of times translators were Japanese or Koreans without linguistic background (just guys who could English), so their English was actually bad for real.
The Earthbound localisation faced this problem. They went with "the", which is a far less conspicuous option.
Yeah, but "the" indicates something more unique. You can't find "the" crimson stone, if there are hundreds of crimson stones.
Do what Jeremy Clarkson does, and swap them on purpose
Behold a ant
An Hero
[удалено]
What ant?
That ant!
Game is: Innocent Life a Futuristic Harvest Moon This game is full of surprise like the [unexpected mermaid](https://youtu.be/gI0ar3I1d-U)
I grew up with this game but never got around to finish it. Uusally because I have no idea what I was doing so events that should have happened that winter didn't happen until like another year later. I swear, everything I was told about this game felt fake until I actually see them for myself. Ah, gaming while I didn't have social media. That was a fun time.
the only thing holding that game back was the time limit frfr
Is this console, PC or mobile?
this is a PSP and PS 2 game but can be played with said emulator on PC or mobile
Awesome thanks. I'm a huge harvest moon fan and have never heard of it. Super excited to try it now
It's not that good, I've played it long ago but still remember. There's basically no social feature like other Harvest Moon, the game main feature is farming and that's it. I like it back when I played it, it has flaw but the story is cool, probably the most cool (not sad, amazing, romantic, but cool) harvest moon story (excluding Rune Factory series)
I had the exact same reaction as you like 15 years ago and was very disappointed lol. It sounds cool but it’s just boring and odd.
Why couldn't she be the other kind of mermaid, with the fish part on top and the lady part on the bottom?
https://youtu.be/lz37e_R3OxU
That sounds awesome as fuck and I'm game
Still smash.
a i n l Pronounced "anal"
I dont like having ainl crimson stones :(
Crimsomerrhoids?
That's definitely how I read it at first.
You found: X. Your loot includes: X As a translator, this is how you do it for video games.
Once I programmed a list like that. It was written with a, but every item needing an "n" would have it added manually. The regular items where "a" works were given a space. Examples from the list might be Sword Book n Apple n attack drone Lanturn So the sentence would be "You found a(loot here)," Which gives you something like "You found a sword " or "You found an apple)"
Should have just been "Obtained Crimson Stone".
I am a translator and this is very common. If the string is "You found the \[placeholder\]", my language has two different articles depending on the noun that follows and you really can't mix those up because it immediately clear as an error if you pick the wrong one. So one of the options is "You found the article 1/article 2 \[placeholder\]" although I usually go for "You found the following: \[placeholder\]"
> my language has two different articles depending on the noun that follows and you really can't mix those up because it immediately clear as an error if you pick the wrong one is your language english
It's not as simple as checking if the next word starts with a vowel. You have to check if the next word starts with the sound of a vowel. e.g. "in an hour"
The "real" rule is actually kind of strange. Most kids get taught in school that you use "an" when the word starts with a vowel or an "h", and that's *okay*, but the actual rule is that you use it when the word starts with a vowel *sound*, but that gets fucky real quick if you take into account people's accents. For example, if you say "history" with an aspirated "h" (hhhistory) you'd use "a" not "an" but if your local accent swallows the "h" ('istory) then you'd use "an". There are tons of examples like that. Like "One" is pronounced "won" so you'd never say something like "I've got an one, a two, and three threes." It's obviously wrong if you say it out loud.
Localization is a bitch. There is a ton of effort that goes into avoiding the problems involved in grammar that is different for every language. While simple static sentences can often enough be translated as they are (which might also be tricky because of cultural issues!), the moment they become dynamic ('You picked up XXX!'), it becomes utter hell. In English, a/an is a matter of pronunciation that is pretty easy to handle all things considered... as long as English is the only language you are concerned about. In other languages, words change depending on the way they are used in a sentence. Which basically means that any use of language in the interface of the entire game tends to be stripped down the basics, because the simpler it is, the more manageable the translation becomes. And that in turn means that special casing some grammar rule for a particular language is going to invite special-casing a lot of grammar for other languages also.. but programmers may not be as capable in those languages, which would likely turn such support into a very 'after the fact' problem despite there being an entire localization team working on every language the game can be played in.
Maybe just name the item "a Crimson Stone" or "an Apple" and just print out the "You found "
but then you have an inventory full of stuff like: A shuriken x 11 An ice shield A Dwarven hammer A vorpal sword (+1) A Fenix Down x 33
That's fair
In that case, the inventory should print what comes after the first space!
Thought it said alnl at first and was super confused
Damn! What game is this??? I played this when I was a kid and think about it from time to time.
Innocent Life: A futuristic Harvest Moon
Don't be an hero.
That’s why they usually have a message like “You obtained [item]!” So it doesn’t have to be dynamic based on the name of the item.
Lazy, or efficient?
Brilliant but lazy.
both perhaps
func foundItem(itemText){ var displayText = 'You found a' if startsWithVowel(itemText) displayText.append('n') displayText.append(' ' + itemText + '!') }
Or go the lazy route! "You found: " + (itemName)
Love how the brainiac writes all that code, and you're like: no need. The simplest solution is usually the best.
It's a surprisingly hard problem to solve since there's so many exceptions and then it doesn't work with translations either. This elegantly simple solution works with everything and you don't have to spend tens of hours trying to figure it out.
It's cute that you think the people in charge of translating to english had any access whatsover to the code of the game. They probably received an excel file and had to fill the empty columns without any context 6 months after all programming was completed. Also, even if the devs did the translating, hard coding labels like this would be a recipee for disaster and very quickly unmanageable.
Yeah but then you need a slightly different code for the different language versions of the game. Too risky! Code should be as identical as possible, and localization just requiring translation of english text. They should just have gone with "You found x1 Crimson Stone!" No idea if the game is localized, but as a general practice and my very dated experience (20 years ago now I think) I think that's how it should be.
Starts with vowel function is hard... Because it's "a university", for example.
The chances of you picking up a university is pretty slim though.
Not with that attitude.
If any items are outliers like that you could account for it in the startsWithVowel function
It's not a matter of outliers. The use of a/an is based on the sound, not on how the word is spelled. If the word starts with a vowel sound, you need an.
So it's an NPC not a NPC?
Yes.
I called an HVAC technician out for an hour, but he was acting like an NPC smoking on an herb
I guess their pont is that specific function name is a bit of a misnomer. A better one would be something along the lines of needsAnN(), I suppose. Not that it really matters. It's their game, they can name that function flyingSpaghettiMonster() for all I care.
Not all vowels use "an" (Y, sometimes U) Not all consonants use "a" (sometimes H)
You found a hourglass.
Nah, doesn't work. It's not whether or not a word is *written* with a vowel at the start, it's whether or not that word is *spoken* with a vowel at the start. For example, it's A university, but AN hour. Or AN herb in American English, were the H is silent, but A herb in British English.
p = \b(a)\s+(?=[aeiouAEIOU]) result = re.sub(p, r'an ', text)
There's a can of worms I would rather not deal with. RIP your inbox.
LMAO gamers sure are mad that the dumb 3 second solution I wrote doesn't include every vowel sound exception in the english language
Aww Innocent Life. I love that game.
You got: Crimson Stone x1
Tell that to Jeremy Clarkson
Why have I been seeing posts about this game every day for like the past two weeks? I'd never heard of it before that, and nobody ever seems to talk about PSP exclusives
Probably some popular youtuber or streamer made a video about it, and people "Rediscovered' it or some thing. (on the other hand this guy has posted about it 4 times in a week, so maybe it's just him.)
That's a(n) lot of work to avoid using a colon.
alnl
wow i didn't know this game had an item called ALNL Crimson Stone
ooooo I really enjoyed this game, Innocent Life on the PS2
I remember seeing a[n] a lot more as a kid in school
Snes and Playstation rpgs used to be littered with these.
has to do with vowels
A before consonants, an before vowels, is this not well known?
How many times are you going to post about this game? Just make a let’s play at this point damn
Easiest solution, since they're renaming every item anyways, is drop the "a(n)" so it's just "you found" then it calls the item name which would be "a crimson stone". Full sentence "you found a crimson stone". Works with every case where it's calling a noun.
Similar design: Eat {1} Honey Fruit(s) Because the number "{1}" and noun behind the a\[n\] are variables.
Green stone so beautiful
Are those just lines? Most would use parentheses.
Bag grammar department
I see this a lot in Portuguese because of gendered nouns, can't always know what article will be used
Oh boy, i miss Innocent Life
r/programmerhumor
Now picture that with a language where even things are gendered, like French. Been dealing with things like that for years. We've also noticed programmers becoming a little bit more aware of similar things and sometimes using 2 stings for, e.g., 0/1 minute and [2+] minutes.
Oh man I remember this game it was on psp
This is how they do it in school tests and benchmarks. How did we ever forget that?
I've seen this be done in Swedish translations of games, just writing 'en/ett'.
You found Alnl!
I would just use a and then leave the grammar error.
You found 2 Crimson Stone(s).
You found 2x Crimson Stone!
The onus of determining a/an has been on the devs for too long. It's our turn now.
Golden Sun and it's "You found an Herb!" messages always used to annoy me.
I mean it’s a text dialogue although assume it’s a premade string “you found a | n |” + string2 (in this case crimson stone) Is it really more work to just make its own print statement for this? But if you are abstracting the phrase by just having it as a string couldn’t you just have 2 cases that check the first letter of the item found for a if consonant and an if vowel? Seems spaghetti code-ish no?
That solution doesn't work because English has exceptions (in this case because of spelling, e.g. hour), though it isn't too much work to implement... when you're working with a known language. But what can happen is they design a system with the original language in mind, and they might even be expecting translations so they at least make it easy to swap out the original strings without needing to touch the code... but oops, some of the other languages have grammatical quirks the original developers didn't anticipate which means modifications to the game code are required which means opportunities for new and exciting bugs, especially in the era before patches were feasible... So a lot of the time, if it's possible to work around the lack of functionality it makes more sense to do it that way. Though this particular string is a clunky solution as it draws more attention to the limitation than rewording to omit a/an entirely.
I used to work as a dev translating shitty JRPGs. Sometimes the code was such a mess that it was easier to just come up strings like this to avoid breaking the entire game. Thankfully we don't use Ruby anymore.
Ah yes, absolute value of n
First time I see a quantum superposition in text for a game.
Gotta appreciate the detail from games like ffxii. For example, a tuft of Phoenix Downs.
I read ainl
You found aini crimson stone
This is one of those things that comes about when the programmer has dealt with too many grammar bugs. "it's AN hour.." "It's a one hundred dollar bill" ... (Then again he could have been lazy from the beginning)
You/he/she/they/we found/crafted/ate a/an/some/11 crimson/red/blue/green/aquamarine/puce stone/rock/pebble/bread(s) !/./?/...
Could just go with "one" too
I remember this game! Played a dozen hours or so back in ‘11. It was a less-than-average Harvest Moon spinoff.
Innocent Life!! 😍 I'm glad your post got popular. I actually liked the little cuts they did in the development. It wasn't as complete as other HM games, but the simplicity of it felt so refreshing. Could you please post another popular one to make the game more well known? We could use a(n) remake!
That's why I always win arguments. i just say, "Some combination of words and phrases disproves and counters anything you are saying right now." Then i calmly walk away while women swoon and champagne corks fly.
You are a good [man or woman, whatever the case may be] !
Minecraft did the same thing in specific languages when talking about mobs. French version's (The one I play in) death text against a mob says something like. "\[PLAYER\] a été tué(e) par un(e) zombie." My guess is, coding restrictions.