Topic: The Principle of your System
The idea of the Perpetuum infrastructure has been engineered to be robust from pretty much Day 1, although admittedly we kept expanding on several things over time. The concept was the following: Since we're a very very small group of developers, we cannot afford turnaround time and taking time away from each other when it comes to fixing things, so the optimal solution is to allow anyone to fix anything they can. Of course, this doesn't mean that people with no interest in coding can happily add mov ax, 1 into random places into our source tree, but it's important to realize that in a project like Perpetuum (which is a rather strongly data-driven game), we have several times more the data than we have actual code. This means that as long as the artists and content folks can change the data, programmers can work independently of them, so essentially what it boils down to is exposing as much data as we can. (If you started giggling, do a few push-ups. It helps.)
The RED part doesnt involve Translators and translations.
Theres one MAJOR aspect thats rather anoying, I try to explain with an example:
DEV Alf (The balancing guy)
changes a module from "Unique" to "non Unique" - he can do this with two clicks AFAIKDEV Quodys (The Text guy)
then has to change the Item description of that module for ALL Tiers individually (from T0 - T4+, and all prototypes)Up to 18 Translators
each one of them HAS to notice that change and search manually for the entries that got changed if they do not log in on daily basis.
Things that happened or can happen:
Alf forgot to notify Quodys about that change, or it happend 5min before patch
Quodys forgot to flag the changed entries after he modified them.
voluntary Translator quit, the entry never changed since noone else understands that language
An the only thing that is wrong here? The information, that an item is "Unique" "Mission Ammo" "Niani" "Elite" "prototype" "T0" "cannot be recycled" is written into the same textbox as the item description that would be exactly the SAME for all items
A T0 has the same text as a T4
For those who are still reading:
recently the Mission ammo got changed from "can only be aquired as mission reward" to "can only be bought form syndicate shop" -> thats one sentence try to count how many entries have to be changed.
If DEV Alf decides that ERPs are no unique modules anymore in the future:
3 types * (4 tiers + 3 protos + 2 elite) * 18 languages.
Whining - It's amazing how fast your trivial concerns will disappear