Couple of oddities

First example was with the zoomable tech tree. At one of the settings, it didn't quite line up in the box properly.

In the second example, this seems a peculiarity in phrasing. My military strength is 205, but the enemy's is ONLY 215? Since it's the higher number, it would seem the intensifier is either unneccessary, or should be under my strength, since it's the lesser of the two numbers. The dialogue occurred when the game reported that the enemy would not be able to sustain the war, and about a turn afterward it offered a peace treaty and I was able to demand one of its planets that was in my space.

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In the second example, this seems a pecularity in phrasing. My military strength is 205, but the enemy's is ONLY 214? Since it's the higher number, it would seem the intensifier is either unneccessary, or should be under my strength, since it's the lesser of the two numbers.

Any information the game gives you which relates to military, economy or science comparisons is never somthing to be taken seriously.

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Any information the game gives you which relates to military, economy or science comparisons is never somthing to be taken seriously.

You may have a point, this is the same robotic technology that thinks going "millions and millions" of miles is a greater accomplishment than traveling lightyears in the same amount of time.

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

Faugh, this is a clear example of when flavor text should yield to clear UI about the underlying mechanics!

I'm all for feisty comments from Snarky of the Snathi, but my limited understanding of XML leads me to believe errors like "only at 215" when you are *only* at 205 are not necessary. Can't the code do a greater-or-less-than comparison and route to appropriate flavor text?

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

But suddenly my coder-groupy self wonders just how much XML has to do with the guts of us seeing a particular chunk of flavor text.

If someone who's skills were mostly just English wanted to help "fix" something like this, could we get by if we're only able to handle a crude tagging scheme like baby HTML or that old-school stuff IBM used to support on VM mainframes?

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But suddenly my coder-groupy self wonders just how much XML has to do with the guts of us seeing a particular chunk of flavor text.

Pretty much nothing. The strings used in most of the game text like that are not XML--They're just lines of text in the .str tables, with placeholders for names/values to be inserted by the engine (the flavor text that is in an XML file is basically the same--just strings with placeholders for names and values).

The most that could be done to correct issues like the 'only bigger' one on the user end of things would be to edit the .str file to make all such strings value-neutral (i.e., take out the 'only').

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