DCSS Text Improvement Taskforce

[Mychaelh]

Thank you for comments.

Trog: I wanted it to sound like a medical examination, but only native English speaker can decide, what and how it sounds best.
Okawaru: thank you, I will change it.
Makhleb: more suggestion by other players would be nice
Yred: He does lack interest in undead and demon kills, Kiku appreciates demon kills.


The descriptions I posted are all still prototype status, they get corrected, changed and improved of course. The more input from players, the better.

[Grimm]

Makhleb: more suggestion by other players would be nice

Total War does sound a bit odd. How about "Makhleb's demonic jihad/crusade"? Also, what do you mean by "delition"?

[Mychaelh]

New altar descriptions I made up:

A corrupted altar of Lugonu
An altar to Lugonu the Unformed, possibly dedicated to
some other power before it was irrevocably corrupted.
The structure of this sanctuary has been teared up from
within, while a distorted opening to the chaotic void
has manifested. As you get more close for inspection,
the impression of an unseen vile force leaches out
from the void into your mind. It tries to entangle your
awarness and a rising feeling of existential absorption
begins to worry you.

A radiant altar of Vehumet
At the latest magical council at Toneusosp, the battle
cardinals of Vehumet where finally forced to
accommodate foreign dictate. All this because of
notorious financial shortfalls, officially claimed due
to meager alms. As consequence the church had to give
up the hermetic monopol over combat magic and share
conjurorational knowledge with it's sister church of
Sif Muna. Additionally, all gender teachings concerning
the sacred Twin Couple of Magic, is now emphatically
branded as heretical thoughts. As such, a former
figurative depiction of Vehumet at this altar was
replaced by a simple mass-produced stele:
Here orthodox vehumetistic warfare doctrine is
superficially still praised, especially the trust in
concentrated assault magic against monster and undead
forces. But certain summonistic formulations betray
editorial revision by Sifmunaists.

[Mychaelh]

'delition' is gibbish. I already changed it to 'extinction' in the spreadsheet.

[Mychaelh]

New Yred:
An evil altar worked from columnar basalt and apparelled
in the silence of a graveyard. This sanctuary of dead
is consecrated to the mighty dead god Yredelemnul.
Located below the altar is a tomb, sealed with
hieroglyphic curses, blaspheming against the the Holy
Trinity. This crypt contains the bones of a distinguished
kinght commander, waiting for the call of his master to
arouse him again.
A plaque offers necromantic powers to all who volunteer
for the Lord of the Dead's crusade too.

Makhleb now makes Jihad.

[Roderic]

Thank you for comments.

Yred: He does lack interest in undead and demon kills, Kiku appreciates demon kills.

I interpret this as a Death god only interested in the potential souls it can get into its realm (i.e. living beings non-demonic) while a demonic-god (god of a demon cult? / a demon deified?) and demons in general fight against their own brethren: it is in their nature and one reason explaining why evil sucks in conquer the world.

[Roderic]

Vehumet description gives an amount of very funny lore but I assume many players have another ideas in mind when thinking on Vehumet. Crawl mythos are not very well defined after all, but just giving few vague hints and letting the player to complete the picture. Maybe more vaguely-loosely stated would help to fit the any version of story a player come up

[Mychaelh]

I have thought about this point, and it's good to have here discussion about it.
Basically I was to bored to make just some generic 'Mage God' description für Vehumet and Sif.
I see them this way.
Vehumet and Sif are no 'real' gods, more saints created by the churches themself.
Vehumet and Sif are deified magic itself, that's why they want casters as followers.
So I can talk more about the churches, and let all questions about the gods open.

Vehumetists are the aristocratic orthodoxy and Sifmunaists the pragmatic scribes, slowly taking over the whole affair.

But better ideas are welcome.

[Blade]

That sounds like imposing your personal mythos on Crawl, which seems like a very bad idea. I much prefer the gods having their personalities established and everything else about them -- gender, state of being, background -- to remain completely mysterious.

On an entirely different topic, I have a question for the taskforce: Are there plans to rename any of the class titles? It is rather discouraging to level a skill to 27 and be stuck with "Axe Maniac" or "Meteorologist." Finding new titles is something I would be happy to help with, if there is any interest.

[Mychaelh]

Thanks you for comment. I'm still thinking about it.
About class titles: I'm not a dev, but I think you can always work out some list, post it first here to get some reviews/input and the post it on mantis.

[nicolae]

I like the title "Meteorologist" for Air Magic, though I've never seen it myself.

[Mychaelh]

I considered Roderic's and Blade's point and made a new altar desc. for Vehumet:

A radiant altar of Vehumet
A shrine made out of red marble, ablaze in lights from
within, promising great destructive powers. It houses
an altar dedicated to Vehumet the Battlemage and is
open for all, who want to follow this god. Inside the
sanctuary the walls are decorated with reliefs,
depicting old engagements. You see the conjurer
cardinals of Vehumet in grim battle with undead and
beasts, fought during Yredelemnul's Apostasy.
The Vehumetists seem occupied with magical fighting,
don't praising their god, who observes the scenes from
above.

New ones:

A viscous altar of Jiyva
A large deep pit of mucosa, bubbling with strange glowing
exudate of arcane nature and ever-shifting in form.
This erratically altar to Jiyva, sporadical gushs out
it's secretion like a geyser of slime. The whole mess
trips from the walls and ceiling all around here, but
you're not sure what it's made from, and you don't
really want to know.
Suddently the pit snorts curious and then get's
expectant silent, as if it had noted your presence.

A deep blue altar of Sif Muna
An shrine of the deepest blue marble, covered in
intricate patterns and writings in long forgotten
scripts, devoted to Sif Muna the Loreminder. Before the
altar a magical circle is engraved into the stone
floor, enclosed with arcane glyphs from all known
skills of magic. You have to demonstrate some real
practical knowledge, to be accept by Sif Muna as
neophyte.

[cerebovssquire]

Regarding a current branch description:

  Code:

Pan                                                                             
                                                                                 
Pandemonium is an infinite realm of pain and suffering. It contains four         
special runes, as well as generic ones, in addition to lots of loot. All these   
treasures are guarded by demons and even crueller demon lords. Many a hero,     
confusing confidence with megalomania, has died unsuspectingly in the barrage   
of torment and hellfire.

The current description is fine, but the part about "as well as generic ones" is misleading, since we only have one demonic rune of Zot nowadays (it used to be correct, of course). I think that sentence should be changed to "It contains five runes, four of which have their own legendary guardians", "It contains five runes, four of which are guarded by the fabled overlords of Pandemonium" or something along these lines.
("by especially powerful demonic lords" would work but sounds awkward in my opinion)

[Roderic]

Sif Muna altar is possibly made with or carved in lapis lazuli, sapphire or blue quartz. Marble isn't blue colored unless it has many impurities... I can't remember even if this kimd of marble exists. In tiles it looks like a crystal (quartz?) rather than opaque, but tile design can change if needed.

[Mychaelh]

Lapis lazuli is very good, I will change it to that.

@ cerebovssquire: There are no branch descriptions in the spreadsheet. Maybe make a note on Mantis about the pademonium runes?

[dpeg]

Keep up the good work. The usual reminder: if you have something finished, sent it to me, please. I have little time these days, but I will read it and at the very least relay it. We want your descriptions in the game! I also believe that some monster stuff is still with you and not with me.

[Grimm]

Wensleydale will have the best information on that. I haven't heard from him in a while though.

[Wensleydale]

What a coincidence, I've actually taken advantage of the holidays to finish up the suggested revisions from dpeg's last round of criticism. The patch is in his mailbox right now. In the meantime, here's the list of his criticisms that are more editorial in nature, that I leave for your perusal:

There is some inconsistency in that certain quotes are translated but others not (e.g. cockroach or serpent).

A few entries are missing the dates. This is unfortunate... if you (as a group) can add them, please do. The quotes are interesting enough to make folks try out some books.

giant amoba:
A slightly old scientific account would also have been acceptable. This also goes for other animals.

pan:
Shouldn't there be sources that actually use the term "pandemonium". I seem to recall it has biblical connotation.

rakshasa:
I don't understand this one. Isn't this one of Indian origin?

Of course, whether or not these criticisms are still applicable will depend on how many revisions to the quotes page have taken place in the last three months. :P

I'll have a few more days off at the end of this week, and I'll be attempting to at least get started on finishing off the monsters tab once and for all.

[Grimm]

There is some inconsistency in that certain quotes are translated but others not (e.g. cockroach or serpent).

I have left a few quotes untranslated for variety. I think it's a nice way to acknowledge the international character of the game.

A few entries are missing the dates. This is unfortunate... if you (as a group) can add them, please do. The quotes are interesting enough to make folks try out some books.

If a quote is missing a date it's because I have been unable to source it. Anyone who can fix this is welcome to contribute.

giant amoba:
A slightly old scientific account would also have been acceptable. This also goes for other animals.

We've got some scientific and some funny. I'm happy to change anything that people want to see changed.

pan:
Shouldn't there be sources that actually use the term "pandemonium". I seem to recall it has biblical connotation.

The word was coined by Milton in Paradise Lost, which is where the current quote is taken from. Would people rather see the word pandemonium used?

rakshasa:
I don't understand this one. Isn't this one of Indian origin?

This has been fixed with an Indian quote.

[Wensleydale]

Starting work on finishing off the monster descriptions today. Are there any grey-background cells that you know of that have been edited but have not had their background changed to blue? I've noticed there's a few blue-background cells that have not had their corresponding `status` cell changed from `done` to `yes`.

Also, I'd like it if there was some way on the spreadsheet to note that an entire class of monsters/items/anything all share the same quote, because it's much easier for me to say "all dragons/statues/elves have the same quote" than to define them for each entity individually, using a lot of regrettable duplication (or forcing me to come back at the end, ensure that all monsters of a single glyph have the same quote, and then erase all the duplication).

[Wensleydale]

Monster descriptions patch part deux is complete, submission to dpeg for review forthcoming. There are still a handful of monsters whose descriptions I felt could be better; as ever, these have been marked with "no" in their description review column for easy perusal, and comments left on each giving my reasons why I feel some further revision is necessary in each case. Furthermore, some of the new descriptions in this round were really fantastic, such as all of the elemental statues and the zot statue descriptions.

Nice work, everyone! The monsters tab is very nearly complete! :D

[Mychaelh]

I added more descriptions for altars, traps, stairs, hatches etc.
Also, I would like to know, how much in-game space is there for the quotations texts (spaces in row and lines)?
How about special letters? There are Japanese characters in the quotation for giant spiked club and in the quotation I've inserted for Lugonu's altar, the word "Æthyr" has some nice letter (like German Ä).

[Wensleydale]

I added more descriptions for altars, traps, stairs, hatches etc.
Also, I would like to know, how much in-game space is there for the quotations texts (spaces in row and lines)?

Please limit quote text (including attribution lines and such) to at most 20 lines, where each line may be at most 80 characters. Crawl will wrap lines intelligently for you, so you should not insert manual line breaks unless they appear in the source text (such as most poetry). Technically we can display up to 21 lines, but that makes the screen look cramped. Note that the quotes page does not scroll nor does it truncate intelligently; if you exceed the 21-line hard limit, no quote whatsoever will be displayed.

How about special letters? There are Japanese characters in the quotation for giant spiked club and in the quotation I've inserted for Lugonu's altar, the word "Æthyr" has some nice letter (like German Ä).

Using unicode characters is perfectly acceptable, as (I believe) Crawl assumes UTF-8 encoding by default. For example, both the water glyph and the cloud glyph in normal gameplay are unicode glyphs, and will display as two-character-wide gibberish for someone whose terminal is set up to only use ASCII. And if someone's terminal can't accept UTF-8, well, they probably wouldn't be able to read foreign language characters anyway. :P

If you do use unicode glyphs, though, please do ensure that the glyph exists in the Courier New font, as that's probably the most limiting of the common default fixed-width fonts (let's not worry about Fixedsys for now).

The only exception to this rule is that I'd prefer it if em dashes were rendered as -- (two hyphens) rather than as the unicode glyph — because the dedicated em dash glyph will probably be indistinguishable from a hyphen in a fixed-width font.

[edlothiol]

Actually, while console and webtiles fully support Unicode, local tiles does not -- it can only display ISO 8859-1. This means that e.g. ÄÖÜ and Æ are ok, but japanese letters are problematic (see the link for the full character set). I believe kilobyte is planning to fix this someday, but I don't know when it will happen. So I'd recommend keeping the descriptions with problematic letters around, but they can't yet be used in the game.

[Wensleydale]

Furthermore, I would be surprised if Courier New (or, for that matter, any default fixed-width font on any machine in this hemisphere) featured support for Japanese glyphs. Webtiles might still be able to get by with the inherent font substitution capabilities of web browsers, but for now it's probably wise to stick to Latin-ish characters with various diacritics.

For example, here's our new quote for the ballistomycete, featuring a Romanized transliteration of Chinese characters:

  Code:

"zhǎn cǎo bù chú gēn, chūn fēng chuī yòu shēng"
"If the roots are not removed during weeding, the weeds will grow again when the winds of Spring blow."
    -Chinese proverb

[Grimm]

Monster descriptions patch part deux is complete, submission to dpeg for review forthcoming. There are still a handful of monsters whose descriptions I felt could be better; as ever, these have been marked with "no" in their description review column for easy perusal, and comments left on each giving my reasons why I feel some further revision is necessary in each case.

I'll attend to these soon.

Furthermore, some of the new descriptions in this round were really fantastic, such as all of the elemental statues and the zot statue descriptions.

Definitely, some great work here. I know an effort was made to write all the statue descriptions on a similar pattern.

I have to admit that we've taken a fair amount of the humor out. A lot of the snarky jokes have been replaced with informative but plain text.

Are there any grey-background cells that you know of that have been edited but have not had their background changed to blue? I've noticed there's a few blue-background cells that have not had their corresponding `status` cell changed from `done` to `yes`.

I'll go through the whole tab again. The wrong stati are probably my fault, as I've been making a few minor corrections but probably forgot to change all the cells.

Also, I'd like it if there was some way on the spreadsheet to note that an entire class of monsters/items/anything all share the same quote, because it's much easier for me to say "all dragons/statues/elves have the same quote" than to define them for each entity individually, using a lot of regrettable duplication (or forcing me to come back at the end, ensure that all monsters of a single glyph have the same quote, and then erase all the duplication).

I'll take care of this soon and post here when I've finished.

[Grimm]

"Soon" means thirty days. The monsters tab is done now, hopefully in time for 0.10.

- A couple of already-entered fields have had minor corrections and been marked with blue/yes.

- Some questionable entries have been reverted to the extant-in-game text.

- Some names are in blue. These are suggested changes but I haven't run them by anyone apart from a post earlier in this thread. They are as follows:

plague bearer (was: rotting hulk)
royal mummy (was: greater mummy)
tweeblaarkanniedood plant (was: plant. alternatives: !kharos plant, khurub plant, nyanka plant, and onyanga plant)
vampire count (was: vampire knight)
cavern fungus or troglobitic fungus (was: fungus)
floating sporeball (was: giant spore)
grouper (was: big fish)

Also, I'd like it if there was some way on the spreadsheet to note that an entire class of monsters/items/anything all share the same quote, because it's much easier for me to say "all dragons/statues/elves have the same quote" than to define them for each entity individually, using a lot of regrettable duplication (or forcing me to come back at the end, ensure that all monsters of a single glyph have the same quote, and then erase all the duplication).

I started going through and replacing duplicate quotes with "SAME AS [MAIN MONSTER]" but on rereading this I wasn't sure if that was the right approach. I think you mean you want a given quote to be labelled with all the monsters that share it, is that correct?

[Galefury]

Oh god please, leave the poor plants alone. Do you really suggest renaming them to something nobody has ever heard of, just because there are a bunch of African plants that look kind of like the horrible plant tile? It's a plant. They're not all identical, they just have the same tile.

Also rotting hulks are pretty cool IMO. Nifty detail: their corpses start out rotting.

[Grimm]

The point with the plants is that there are apparently intentions to introduce other types of plants in the future. When that happens it will be confusing/sloppy to have one generic "plant". I'm not married to my suggestions but I do think the name should be changed.

there are a bunch of African plants that look kind of like the horrible plant tile

It's actually just the one species, Welwitschia. Those are names for it in different languages.

[Grimm]

"Floating sporeball" is objectively better because the extant name is incorrect and misleading: the thing is not a giant spore, it emits spores when it bursts, therefore it is a sporeball. And it floats. A subjectively better name could be invented but almost anything is better than the current name.

Vampire count and royal mummy are more flavourful than the extant names.

I haven't heard about any plans to introduce more plants...I don't see why anyone would want to, we already have statues for stationary monsters and those don't interfere with Fedhas.

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... res:plants
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=de ... tid=757516

[Grimm]

Valid points. The suggestions above are merely suggestions from people who contributed to the spreadsheet. I haven't seen any dev support for them so I doubt they'll get in.

[Grimm]

Looks like a lot of our monster descripts and quotes didn't make it in time for 0.10. I'm more than half done with items though so we might see both sections finished for 0.11.

[nicolae]

Monster Descriptions Part 2 just went in, ladies and gentlemen.

http://git.develz.org/?p=crawl.git;a=co ... f83a67ac70

Ah, it seems like only yesterday I was typing some of those into Google spreadsheets...

[Grimm]

Thanks for doing that. Items tab is within a whisker of being finished. Let me know if I can organize the information better - Wensleydale was talking about having identical text fields marked as such.

[Wensleydale]

Thanks for doing that. Items tab is within a whisker of being finished. Let me know if I can organize the information better - Wensleydale was talking about having identical text fields marked as such.

Not that you shouldn't thank nicolae, but you especially shouldn't thank me, as the one who's had that patch sitting around languishing since December. (In my defense, there was a bunch of dev drama and it sort of got forgotten in the shuffle.)

Thanks should be directed at elliptic for reminding me that I had it, and at galehar for promptly reading over it and pushing it in. And, of course, to all of you as well! Let's try and get another tab done before 0.11. :)

[Grimm]

Not that you shouldn't thank nicolae, but you especially shouldn't thank me, as the one who's had that patch sitting around languishing since December.

If I'd worked on this as hard as I could have, with my current free time, it would have been completely finished two months ago. THAT'S languishing.

[nicolae]

Not that you shouldn't thank nicolae

Well... all I did was post that the commit went in. I read the commits every day. Perhaps I should be... institutionalized.

Wait, no, that's not how it goes--

I've got some free time, perhaps I'll put on my writing hat once more and work on the items tab sometime soon.

[dpeg]

Sorry for flaking out -- but was there real drama? Also, I'd like to think I mentioned repeatedly that stuff was potentially getting lost. I hate it, and I am happy it didn't happen here. Thanks once more for the great team effort!

[rchandra]

not sure if this is the right place - but I've been thinking the Book of Annihilations should be renamed. Right now we have artefact books with exotic names, "book of foo" for normal books, and the Necronomicon/Grand Grimoire.

From a list of magic-related texts, I like the "Pneumatologia occulta". "The Black Dragon" is also pretty good.
http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/librarie ... books.html

If I were just making something up, "the Doomsayer" or even "Annihilator".

[Mychaelh]

More suggestions for possible renaming of Book of Annihilations to bring it in line with Necronomicon and Grand Grimoire:

Grimorium Verum
Dr. Fausts Höllenzwang
Heptameron
Lemegeton
Ars Notoria
Sepher Raziel HaMalach
Sworn Book of Honorius
Buch Abramelin
Galdrabok
Arcanum Experimentia praetiosum

good German list of grimoires:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_magischer_Schriften

[galehar]

Grimm do you read commit log? There has been a few rewording, tweaking and reverting to the latest patch. You should have a look at what was changed and why. So, if you don't read commit logs, poke me and I'll send a few links.

[Grimm]

I don't read the logs. I will pm you forthwith.

[galehar]

Here you go:

Tweak wording and punctuation.
Minor text improvement improvements
Fix typo.
Fix spelling.
A bunch of reverts/merges/rewords for monster descriptions, as discussed on IRC.

[Kate]

The main thing I fixed was gender references - maybe worth mentioning in the text improvement guidelines? Gods are never referred to with an explicit gender, and neither are most monsters (other than monsters that are all the same gender such as mermaids and sphinxes, and uniques of course).

Lots of great content though, thanks to all the contributors.

[Grimm]

I didn't even think about the gender thing. I'll add that to the guidelines and be mindful of it in the future.

The other corrections all look good (I missed some obvious mistakes), apart from silver statue - can't we keep more of the elaborate description? It matches with the fuller descriptions for all the statues.

Now that translation work is beginning it would be very useful to have a central location for all text work - translations, new/changed text, requests for text. I am willing to transfer the Google spreadsheet data.


I am happy that this is a way for non-coders to give back to the game and the community.

[galehar]

The other corrections all look good (I missed some obvious mistakes), apart from silver statue - can't we keep more of the elaborate description? It matches with the fuller descriptions for all the statues.

There's actually a thread on c-r-d about the silver statue description.

Now that translation work is beginning it would be very useful to have a central location for all text work - translations, new/changed text, requests for text. I am willing to transfer the Google spreadsheet data.

The page I've set up to test my script should be usable now. I'll edit some minor uneeded stuff like translated name. Is there everything you need? Once the layout is ok, I can generate more, what sections are you working on?
Once it's polished enough, I'll commit the script so you can generate the pages yourself

[Grimm]

An ideal text workpage would have

- automatic updates from trunk with current text, new monsters, items and so forth
- a system for easily finding recent changes
- changes labelled with name of changer
- a system for making requests for improvements to a piece of text
- an editing interface that is easier to use than the dev wiki one

The Items page is what we're currently working on. Dungeon features, Uniques, and Gods are the next three, in that order.

[jpeg]

An ideal text workpage would have

- automatic updates from trunk with current text, new monsters, items and so forth

Could be tricky in case of conflicts.

- a system for easily finding recent changes
- changes labelled with name of changer

Isn't that what a wiki does automatically? Unless you mean to include changes taking place in trunk, in which case not so much. Might be useful to set up a system akin to the documentation, i.e. that descriptions and translations are only ever transferred from the wiki to the repository, never vice versa.

- a system for making requests for improvements to a piece of text

Once the translations get going, I expect the bug tracker to get flooded with bug reports about typos and grammar errors in all the languages available. I bring this up here because the two issues might be related.

- an editing interface that is easier to use than the dev wiki one

Hmm... not sure what you mean. Tables and formatting are a problem in editing, I admit, and it would be helpful if there was a better way to handle those. (Maybe find some way to get this to work without tables, just a simple header and then under sub-headers, the original text and the translation/updated description.) Is that what you mean?

The Items page is what we're currently working on. Dungeon features, Uniques, and Gods are the next three, in that order.

Do you have any plans for the smaller description sets for species, skills and spells? Personally, I consider these more important than the flavour descriptions of features and items, so I would start out with translating these, but of course there's little point to doing that if they get completely rewritten afterwards.