Development Cycle Archive

What annoy's me is NPC spam.

Like other people talking to NPC's. I don't care to hear NPC's talking unless it's related to something I am doing.

This may have been mentioned already..only made it through about 2 pages of the thread.

At the Gungan Sacred Place there are a couple other gungans beside Boss Nass. When I first went both of these other gungans offered missions but the info about it was broken. Basically the text boxes for both would be completely empty but you could still say yes or no or a third option which was also blank then the Stop Conversing option. After the vehicles patch I visited this location again and one of these 2 gungans would no longer speak to me and the other was still broken. I submitted tickets at the time and have not been back since then, but if this has not been fixed I would like to know what I am commiting myself to before I agree to doing their missions .

The use of "their" as a third person singular pronoun in a subject of great debate. It'sa pet peeve of my Dad's.

I heard a linguist on NPR do a story about it once.

Jeffrey Nunberg worked at Xerox Research PARC (the birthplace ofcomputer "windows" and the mouse)for years and is now a professor at Stanford, I believe. He's a frequent contributor to "Fresh Air with Teri Gross" and is the author of a book of collected essays originally featured on the show called "The Way We Talk Now."

He said that many self-appointed language "purists" consider it a major no-no. They think it's a faux pa that didn't show up until the "PC" era.

These purists believe that "he" should be used by default in all cases where there is no gender specificity, usually in generalities.

However, he said, its usage dates back many centuries.

In any case, it can still seem somewhat jarring on occasion and should be used somewhat sparingly.

I bring this up because there's an example of its usage that often bugs me a bit.

When you get an entertainer buff, the text says something like "(Player name) directs their performance at you."

In this case, since you are watching or listening to the performer in question, you usually know their gender just by looking at them (Heh, I used it in that sentence, too. Hard to avoid. However, I am using a generality here. And sorry ladies, sometimes its hard to tell a Wookiee female from her male counterpart).

This can be avoided with some rewording.

The text could say something like, "The dancer does a special dance to mesmerize you."

On a completely unrelated note, there's a language thing off the top of my head that I find more funny than annoying.

As an unarmed combatant, I need to stay close to my target or it gets out of range. So I keep up with it by following.

When I've killed it, I always get the message, "you stop followinga corpse of" the creature or NPC in question.

Usually, when I think about corpses, I don't think of them going anywhere. So how could I follow one? I know that "a corpse of a" is part of the %TT command, so it might not be possible to change it.

I don't think I want it changed in the first place.

Changing it would rule out all sorts of hillarity.

I love seeing things like "(Player X) grabs a corpse of a piket longhorn and drags it on to the dance floor."

One of my favorites is when you are in a starport and you type /toss st the text says "you toss a starport high in the air."

Please don't change this. Its harmless fun

You can change the entertainer performance thing, though.

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Q-3PO wrote:

I'm starting to go through the bug database to fix up misc. text bugs. Other than Loading Screen bugs (separate thread for that), what text bugs annoy you most? I'm talking about grammatical, spelling, boxes in place of punctuation, etc. Please give as much detail as you can to help me locate these guys in the text tool.

(Please note, I have no programming skills to speak of, so this "low level" task is not taking away from any designer fixing the top issues).

Thanks for the second set of eyes.

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You can only call a pet while OUTSIDE in a city, a camp, ......................

The all caps on the OUTSIDE is really annoying. The wording "outside in a city" is also confusing. At first i thought it was a typo.

After the no camp calling restrictions are removed (midas well just dothe text rewordingnow)it should read

"You can only call a pet or vehiclewhile outdoors."

No need for CAPS on anything.

Thanks.