I want to contribute...

[AndreyKva]

... with grammar and spelling corrections.

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/44457

 

I am an aspiring Grammar Nazi who has his own little mod that fixes the little grammar and spelling errors that were left even in the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, and I want to make those corrections easily accessible to anyone, and what better way to do that than merge it with a popular bug-fix patch mod thing? I heard the team was friendly and open to contributions, so, meh, why not.

 

Million dollar question, do I have experience with the dev tools? I half completed the Fallout 3 GECK tutorial and made my little patch, which then turned out to be incompatible with USKP, due to how USKP wasn't a master and it overwrote the bug fixed quests with the grammar corrected quests by me, so I redid it from scratch, with USKP as a master. So, yes, experience is yes has. Why me? Well, it just seems like there is no-one in the team that is actually dedicated to fixing grammar and spelling that Beth were too lazy to fix. I mean, yeah, there are quite a few grammar and spelling mistakes, as well as some inconsistencies, that were fixed, but there are still some left. USKP is dedicated to bring the best, most bug free Skyrim experience possible and I genuinely think I am able to contribute to that, even if it is something as small as grammar.

[Nico coiN]

This is exactly what I did for the french community, and I think I don't usurp the title of 'grammar nazi' myself. However, even if I grant a huge importance to typos, I have one thing to point out :

 

Making a huge amount of typo corrections in the french version (and I weigh my words) produced a huge plugin with many records and many potential incompatibilities with other mods (not only USKP). I had to seriously consider if it was really worth the effort, and then I found THE way to benefit from both USKP and typo corrections with absolutely no conflict.

 

The typo dedicated patch that we have in the french community is entirely based on this trick, and the esp 'alone' contains as few records as possible (to have the least impact possible on compatibility). This trick may also enable a significant USKP/UDGP/UHFP/UDBP esps size reduction. The problem is : the solution has more to concern about hacking instead of modding, even if IMO it is 100% safe. This 'unofficial way to alter the entire game text' may cause the anger from a few grumpy lizards...

 

So, is it worth for me to explain the process ? ... 

 

The main conductors of the project have to express their opinion about the issue.

[Arthmoor]

Size of the esp is of no real concern to me. The main reason grammar and spelling errors haven't been as aggressively pursued is because they don't get reported much and we focus on the higher priority targets in the tracker.

 

If you've got a mod that handles all that, yes, we'd be happy to merge that in and list you in the credits for it.

 

Compatibility isn't an issue either since any other mod that happened to touch the same records would win out due to the Rule of One.

[AndreyKva]

Size of the esp is of no real concern to me. The main reason grammar and spelling errors haven't been as aggressively pursued is because they don't get reported much and we focus on the higher priority targets in the tracker.

 

If you've got a mod that handles all that, yes, we'd be happy to merge that in and list you in the credits for it.

 

Compatibility isn't an issue either since any other mod that happened to touch the same records would win out due to the Rule of One.

Great, in a month or two, I'll come up with a final version in ESP format with USKP as one of the masters, you'll be able to get it from the Nexus, I think it will be about 1 or 2 megabytes, due to how many errors there are.

 

Also, is there any way I can easily contact you once I have a final version that has been successfully tested and all?

[Arthmoor]

Easiest way would be to PM me here.

[AndreyKva]

Easiest way would be to PM me here.

Right, that's great.

[DayDreamer]

Now, I strongly disagree. Grammar isn't important, what's important is the words match what is actually said by the actors in the voice files. If the actors drop a "the", we should drop it. If the actors add "the", we should add it. If the actors say "tis me" instead of "it's me" -- that's what we should write!

 

In English, they used actors with different dialects to indicate different status and places. Perhaps they did that for French as well.

 

I remember that the French are more formal about such things. So what! To my ears, there's a tremendous difference between Normandy, Parisian, and Provence dialects -- not to forget Quebecois. Celebrate it instead of quashing it....

[AndreyKva]

Now, I strongly disagree. Grammar isn't important, what's important is the words match what is actually said by the actors in the voice files. If the actors drop a "the", we should drop it. If the actors add "the", we should add it. If the actors say "tis me" instead of "it's me" -- that's what we should write!

 

In English, they used actors with different dialects to indicate different status and places. Perhaps they did that for French as well.

 

I remember that the French are more formal about such things. So what! To my ears, there's a tremendous difference between Normandy, Parisian, and Provence dialects -- not to forget Quebecois. Celebrate it instead of quashing it....

Uhh... what? I am only saying that I want to contribute with the grammar and spelling, since the patch did a lot of that in Oblivion, I am not asking the whole team to stop working on everything and fix grammar instead.

[DayDreamer]

Uhh... what? I am only saying that I want to contribute with the grammar and spelling, since the patch did a lot of that in Oblivion, I am not asking the whole team to stop working on everything and fix grammar instead.

Huh? nothing was mentioned about "the whole team" -- all I'm saying is don't fix grammar, fix mismatched voice and text. Listen to each voice file. Yes, it's a lot harder than just eyeballing text.

[AndreyKva]

Huh? nothing was mentioned about "the whole team" -- all I'm saying is don't fix grammar, fix mismatched voice and text. Listen to each voice file. Yes, it's a lot harder than just eyeballing text.

So, I should just drop what I am doing for that? No thanks, I said I wanted to contribute with fixing grammar, that is what I am going to do. I don't have enough time to listen to each voice file and see if it is correct or not. I personally think grammar is more important than matching text to voice files, and please don't insult me because of how I am trying to contribute, because at least I am contributing with something.

[DayDreamer]

I personally think grammar is more important than matching text to voice files, and please don't insult me because of how I am trying to contribute, because at least I am contributing with something.

No, grammar is not more important!

 

By definition, the voice file is canonical. We do modify voices, rarely, but it's harder and thus far requires lots of review.

 

If you're planning on looking for simple typos, please stick to books and notes without in-game corollaries. (A lot of those are already documented at UESP and fixed, so please cross-check.)

 

Nobody is insulting you. But there are things that still need to be done that require many person hours. Adding review person hours to kill off unwarranted changes to grammar isn't going to help much....

[Hana]

Now, I strongly disagree. Grammar isn't important, what's important is the words match what is actually said by the actors in the voice files. If the actors drop a "the", we should drop it. If the actors add "the", we should add it. If the actors say "tis me" instead of "it's me" -- that's what we should write!

 

In English, they used actors with different dialects to indicate different status and places. Perhaps they did that for French as well.

 

I remember that the French are more formal about such things. So what! To my ears, there's a tremendous difference between Normandy, Parisian, and Provence dialects -- not to forget Quebecois. Celebrate it instead of quashing it....

I tend to agree with this.

[AndreyKva]

No, grammar is not more important!

 

By definition, the voice file is canonical. We do modify voices, rarely, but it's harder and thus far requires lots of review.

 

If you're planning on looking for simple typos, please stick to books and notes without in-game corollaries. (A lot of those are already documented at UESP and fixed, so please cross-check.)

 

Nobody is insulting you. But there are things that still need to be done that require many person hours. Adding review person hours to kill off unwarranted changes to grammar isn't going to help much....

Stop trying to make me change my mind. I will only fix grammar, and that is it, and that is a good enough contribution for me. If you want to contribute with fixing voice files and such, ask Arthmoor. I honestly don't care what you think I should do.

[Arthmoor]

Ok, let's dial it down here folks. Starting to get a bit aggressive for no good reason.

 

I do agree that the text needs to be validated against the spoke audio. Unless there's a clear reason to believe the audio is wrong (ie: it mentions a wrong location, or a wrong direction to something) then we usually go with what it says and mold the text to fit if it's wrong.

 

If we're talking about books, it gets dicey because many of the are written in local dialect and each will need to be checked on a case by case basis as far as grammar errors.

 

Actual typos and misspelled words are absolutely fair game though, they always have been in the unofficial patches.

[AndreyKva]

Ok, let's dial it down here folks. Starting to get a bit aggressive for no good reason.

 

I do agree that the text needs to be validated against the spoke audio. Unless there's a clear reason to believe the audio is wrong (ie: it mentions a wrong location, or a wrong direction to something) then we usually go with what it says and mold the text to fit if it's wrong.

 

If we're talking about books, it gets dicey because many of the are written in local dialect and each will need to be checked on a case by case basis as far as grammar errors.

 

Actual typos and misspelled words are absolutely fair game though, they always have been in the unofficial patches.

The thing is, I use UESP to check which books have spelling errors in them. I just CTRL+F [sic] because that marks spelling mistakes that were intentionally copied from the game and most likely made unintentionally. The same thing I do for quests and dialogue and other things.

[Nico coiN]

As I handle the french localization of the game I'm very few concerned by your typo issues, but I'd second Arthmoor' criterias as this is exactly what I've done for the french community, and (as a spelling-purist) i think everything around typo is worth being included in a 'general' fix-mod.

 

However, even if I shall not contradict Arthmoor, I honestly think that a 'general' fix-mod (the USKP and bros') should modify only the bare minimum things. And by 'things' I mean 'records'. It seems to me it's exaggereted to include a complete quest record in the USKP's esp if only a quest objective text has been altered. And as I was forced to do this anyway in not-so-old ages (because there was a time where the CK was the only app that was able to do this safely) I have to report that I completely broke, yes, completely broke some quests in Dawnguard, just because the CK completely deleted properties when saving the esp. It happened to me 4 times...  You really have to be very careful if you want to do it this way...

 

Of course, you can modify nearly any text you want without this huge inconvenient if you fix the typo directly in the STRINGS files (no specific record required in the esp), and this is exactly what I did for the french community (for our own typo fixes, of course). I heard that the german community did the same when it was still very active. Maybe Sclerocephalus can confirm...

[Arthmoor]

However, even if I shall not contradict Arthmoor, I honestly think that a 'general' fix-mod (the USKP and bros') should modify only the bare minimum things. And by 'things' I mean 'records'. It seems to me it's exaggereted to include a complete quest record in the USKP's esp if only a quest objective text has been altered.

There's no choice in the matter though. If the objective is wrong, it needs to be corrected, and then you're stuck with the entire quest record because that's simply how the game stores the data.

It would be nice if the game operated on things by subrecords instead, but it doesn't. So if we had to concern ourselves with that in everything we're doing, we'd never be able to fix any bugs at all.

[Nico coiN]

Exactly, but about texts precisely Beth' had the good idea to export them in STRINGS files. It was first on localization purpose (only one esm for all localized versions of the game, and a set of specific STRINGS files beside). You have the opportunity to rewrite the entire game text if you wish. No record needed for that, even no esp needed for this specific task, just new STRINGS files...

 

And you already partly did it in the past when DLCs unofficial patches were released as multilingual ones...

[Arthmoor]

Yes, but surely you're aware of the difficulty we had in getting people to help with that? That's why we stopped doing the multilingual formatting. Even just for the 5 base languages the game came with we almost never got all of the translation files when we needed them.

 

The automated methods for doing this are nowhere near good enough to simply load up English and click "translate all of this" and have what comes out the other end be coherent.

[Nico coiN]

Uh, yes. But I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing... 

 

I only mean that (if one day you want to do so) you can get nearly all typos out of USKP/UDGP/UHFP/UDBP esps and set them in their related STRINGS files instead. Same result but lighter esps (much less records), especially if typos are very numerous.

[Arthmoor]

Yes, I get that, but in order to do so the file must be converted for multilingual support. Which automatically means that anyone trying to run it without the proper language files simply gets a CTD instead and puts it back into the situation of trying to get translators aboard to handle the updates.

[DayDreamer]

.... Even just for the 5 base languages the game came with we almost never got all of the translation files when we needed them.

What were the original 5 base languages? Touring Carriages has French, German, Polish, Spanish, and Russian so far; are those the original? I was surprised to learn the underlying graphics files that contain words (such as city names) have in some cases been modified to match. Much harder to distribute changes....

 

The automated methods for doing this are nowhere near good enough to simply load up English and click "translate all of this" and have what comes out the other end be coherent.

For Touring Carriages, I only used exact word strings from the original. I've been told that translation is point and click.

 

 

I only mean that (if one day you want to do so) you can get nearly all typos out of USKP/UDGP/UHFP/UDBP esps and set them in their related STRINGS files instead. Same result but lighter esps (much less records), especially if typos are very numerous.

Sounds like a good idea to me! That's what we did in olden days with gettext -- the internal strings (used as keys) could be terrible grammar -- just enough to get the idea across to the translators -- and then we would fix everything in the _en or whatever file.

[Arthmoor]

The original 5 base languages that Skyrim shipped string files for were English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. That's what we had gone with when the unofficial patches were being distributed in a format dependent on those.

 

While it's an excellent idea in theory, in practice it's almost too unwieldy to bother with. The CK cannot edit a language localized file. It will either crash or simply corrupt the whole thing. So there is no official support for doing this properly. One has to use TES5Edit to even set the localization flag to start with and generate the English string files.

 

Plus it's nigh on impossible to get people to be on stand by to handle something of the USKP's magnitude on a regular basis. And now with the game officially supporting Russian, Polish, Japanese, Chinese and Czech, there's little hope we'd be able to keep up with that.

[Nico coiN]

I think we are not on the same wave-length. You are talking about localization and translation but this is absolutely not the issue. You absolutely don't have to handle or support non-US versions of USKP and bros' (this is my task, dedicated to the french community  ).

 

Considering only the US version (your version), you can make as many typo edits as you wish, but you have 2 ways to achieve them (please keep in mind that I'm talking about edits, not brand new texts that would absolutely need complete records in the esp to be taken into account) :

 

1) Including all typo edits in the esp, which would require full associated records each time.

 

OR

 

2) Including all typo edits directly in the game STRINGS files. Of course, you would have to release these STRINGS files with the USKP... I mean a new Skyrim_english.strings file, a new Skyrim_english.dlstrings file, and a new Skyrim_english.ilstrings file.

 

If I fully understood what AndreyKva said, he will provide you soon a huge esp containing very numerous typo fixes, and thus very numerous records. If you want to include them in the actual and classic way, then you fall in case 1). But if all theses typos make the USKP esp doubling its size, then you could rather consider option 2). USKP 1.3.3c already contains slightly more than 7 000 text fields...

 

I can provide you a quick demonstration limited to BOOK records if you want... (Uh, could you send me the 3 original Skyrim english string files to achieve this ? The ones I actually own are 'modified' for US to french translation, and TESVTranslator dictionnary building purpose).

[Vardis]

Doing #2 is asking for trouble, IMO.  Much as the USKP may be the mod people turn to in order to fix much of Bethesda's broken crap, I don't think it should take it upon itself to start overwriting core files and making it difficult for people to remove.

 

Is the size of the ESP actually a problem?