Name sorting suggestion

[Fidcal]

My New Missions list is getting cluttered with lots of FMs starting with 'The' which will make it harder to find stuff as time goes by (and I'm guilty as well with 'The Chalice of Kings.' I suggest mappers drop the 'The' in the darkmod.txt; you can still put the full title elsewhere. So I'm putting 'Heart of Lone Salvation' in my next one.

[STiFU]

  I already wondered why the "The" is used to sort the maps in the ingame menu. It should be visible there though, so that the full title of the FM is shown. Can that be achieved using your method Fidcal or would the programmers have to do some work here? If it can be done using your method, the according files of already released FMs would have to be altered as well though for the sake of consistency. But mind you, that your method is also prone for errors in the mission-release-process. If someone doesn't do it properly, the mission will get sorted to the wrong place. For clarification, the ingame FM-list should look like this (Titles are random...  ):

 

The Arsemen

Beowulf's return

The Spiderweb of Everlasting Shadows

Zak McKracken thiefyfied 

 

Or the article could be appended to the end, separated by a comma, but I prefer the first suggestion:

 

Arsemen, The

Beowulf's return

Spiderweb of Everlasting Shadows, The

Zak McKracken thiefyfied 

Edited December 27, 2009 by STiFU

[etdarkb]

Thats was my idea too, what about changing the sorting algorithm so it ignores lines starting with 'the ', 'a ' or 'an ' case insensitive.

It would be fairly English only choice, but I as far I understood the localization is not a concern (at least in this stage).

[Fidcal]

I don't know whether the gui code could be up to ignoring a preceding 'the'. In any event, I think it might be confusing when you suddenly get a T in the middle of other letters. (OK if negatively indented I suppose)

 

In most case I think the 'The' can be dropped and it looks OK and in others it doesn't work so well. Examples:

 

Chalice of Kings

Heart of Lone Salvation

 

whereas 'The Bell' would be:

 

Bell

 

which doesn't work so well. I would use 'Bell, The' or 'Bell (The)' in that case.

 

Remember, this is just an index list (and pref-briefing summary) and the full name shows on the title loader and briefing.

 

Now if someone can make 'Beowulf and the Arsemen versus Evil Spiderman Victim of Thief Potion in The Spiderweb of Everlasting Shadows' I would definitely play it with or without any 'The's

[Komag]

I prefer the "The" to be at the beginning, like:

 

The Arsemen

Beowulf's return

The Spiderweb of Everlasting Shadows

Zak McKracken thiefyfied

 

No problem to me

[Springheel]

I don't know whether the gui code could be up to ignoring a preceding 'the'.

 

That might be better, but unless there is someone volunteering to do it, then it's up to mappers to name their missions accordingly.

[etdarkb]

And even better with the indentation:

The Arsemen
   Beowulf's return
The Spiderweb of Everlasting Shadows
 A Strange Day
An Unwanted Guest
   Zak McKracken thiefyfied

 

Edit: how can I disable the colored code?

Edited December 27, 2009 by etdarkb

[STiFU]

Yep, that one works best for me too. I've added the suggestion to the bugtracker (Issue #2065), just so that it doesn't get lost and anyone can pick it up, when he/she got some free time... Best way to find volunteers for this! I also strengthened that this is just a minor tweak of minimal importance.

[lostbuthappy]

My two cents:

Maybe it would be a good idea to use a plaintext file with comma separated values or something like that which includes all the articles and allows the users/the team to easily add support for new articles/languages.

 

the, a, an,

le, la, l', les, un, une,

el, la, lo, los, las, un, uno, una,

der, die, das, ein, eine,

[etdarkb]

Well, the most general solution is allowing the mapper to decide: for example a title like 'The ^Bell' would be interpreted as 'The Bell' but ignore the four first characters while sorting and indent.

[Fidcal]

To the best of my knowledge it is not sorted by code but by gui script. I don't know if it can handle anything like that. Plus we are undermanned and have a long list of very serious high priority issues that want fixing first. So it's going to be difficult.

[etdarkb]

If you tell me the gui code/script (what is the difference anyway, the language?) I'd like to see what I can do.

[Fidcal]

I have not worked on this nor have any knowledge of this myself you understand but my guess is that it is mainmenu_newgame.gui in the gui pk4 file. As said, for all I know the sorting might be done by code of which I have no knowledge but I believe it is written in C++. I believe the source is available but I couldn't tell you where.

[Crispy]

The sorting code is in the SDK code, which is written in C++. You can download it from this page, which also has a link to compilation instructions.

 

The relevant function is CModMenu::ModSortCompare in DarkMod\ModMenu.cpp. Have at it.

 

Doing perfect removal of articles in a language-independent way is tricky. For example, consider an FM called "Die Traitor!". We can infer that this is an English title so it should be sorted under "D", but if the code is written to consider German articles then it might strip the "Die" and sort it under "T" instead, which would be wrong. There are also lots of language-specific exceptions like L', which has to be treated specially since it isn't a standalone word. (The code must look for full words in general, since you don't want to turn "Theatre" into "atre"!)

 

So, I suggest doing an unambitious default implementation, and also allowing FM authors to specify a separate FM title (I guess in darkmod.txt) to be used for sorting. That way, FM authors usually don't have to pay attention to sorting, but if the sorting algorithm messes up then they can correct it.