Wednesday 21 August 2013

Patch Format v3

This isn't the long awaited next version announcement, but just some notes on what the new patch format is going to be like, and a request for anything I've missed. Now that that's out of the way...

As translators no doubt know, there's a few problems with v2 of the patch format. In no particular order, I think these are the top 3:

  1. Common strings to multiple files require multiple translations
  2. Big files
  3. No comments

At the very least, I'm aiming to fix all of these in the v3 format. 1) is already fixed (so no more translating "Yes" hundreds of times).  3) is almost done (suggestions on syntax? Currently there's a # COMMENT block, but that's not so easy to type...). 2) isn't started, but the plan is to have a couple of user definable variables which control how much goes into each file (one to control how big something has to be to be in it's own file, and one to control how many things to put into a single 'common' file).

Now: any translators want to suggest any other features that would be nice?