Phonetic Sand CrazyAmphibian - 10/jul/2024
progress on CM has been coming along. I would have to say the slowest and most arduous part of the whole thing is the inline auto-translations. Why is this? Well, because here at DGS, we don't use simple 1:1 word replacers, after all, you have to be double clutching, not granny shifting if you want to make a good game. So yeah. I've been working on a language (conlang, if you want to be technical about it). It's grammatical structure is somewhat close to that of english in terms of SVO, but that's where the similarity starts to end. Compounds to denote tensing, possession, and plurality as well as rederive meanings. indeed, the language has a lot of complexities.
Now, these complexities on their own aren't that hard to write with, what takes the most time is the need for me to constantly refer back to a dictionary spreadsheet and try to guess the best word for the intent i am trying to write.
but it's not done there, because i have to translate it back! and that takes a bit more time than you'd think, because, me wanting to have a good depiction of the language, refuse to make the auto-translation fully accurate to the input english text, and instead intentionally keep "artifacts" that would arise from someone with less experience trying to interpret speech.
Information about the language can be found in the game, mostly in libraries, but there's going to be a few NPCs who will tell you a bit more about the language, be it transactional, or through dialogue.
Other than language i've been working on mapping, which is another difficult part since i'm not that creative visually, that and my design is still due to change.
That and some lore to the world, but nothing too intense. some base quest overviews, shop interfaces, and other things.
the consonant table in the language design doc.
on a non CM related note, i've been learning C (well, i'm writing C++, but i'm writing in a mostly* C-compatible way). It's really not as hard as i was led to believe it would be. maybe it's because i'm a god programmer. maybe it's because it's not actually that hard. or maybe i'm just too deranged of a developer to notice a difference. who is to say?
Will this actually impact the games? maybe. maybe not. The existing game logic is written in Lua, which is already decently fast, and i don't imagine using the C API would actually help that much since, at least in SSTD, the bottleneck isn't game logic, but rather rendering. as for CM, it's not going to be that intensive on the CPU (nor is it a game where you really need the highest framerate, either), so it's not like it matters *that* much. Maybe when i get another idea that is really ambitious i'll have to write some code in C++ (though having to communicate by manipulating the API and calling it from Lua would slow it down a bit initially, so it's hard to say at what point i'd really need to swap to the faster C-like language.).
the affront to god that is my code.