• IdeaArchive
• Place-sensitive capitalization

NerdanelVampire: As I see my side has fewer votes in the capitalization poll on the message board, here is my compromise suggestion.

In the game title-capitalization is used only in the equipment and inventory lists.

a) a Vampiric Long Sword of the Noldor

It is not used elsewhere.

You see a vampiric long sword of the Noldor.

The effect would be easy to achieve, since ToME uses plain ascii.

• Store the names as non-title-capitalized.
• When generating inventory/equipment go through all the words in the strings.
  • If the word is "of" or "the", skip to the next word.
  • If the first letter is in the number range for an uncapitalized letter, flip a bit to make it capitalized, then skip to the next word.
  • If the first letter is something else, skip to the next word.

Negatives:

• Equipment and inventory list generation is slightly slower.
• Someone would have to code the idea.

Positives:

• The slow-down in the equipment and inventory generation is probably not noticeable.
• The normal gameplay itself is not slowed at all.
• Title capitalization appears only where it makes sense.

Additionally

The whole thing could be one or more options.

• Title-capitalize equipment and inventory
• Never title-capitalize
• Always title-capitalize (slow?)

Do this in C, not lua.

Chatter

NeilStevens: First off, Why does your idea depend on ToME using a 7-bit character set, when in fact there is a translation of ToME to Japanese available, and it makes far more sense for ToME to use Latin-1 or better Unicode to support the various accents that Tolkien used? Why does your idea depend on a particular programming language? I suggest that future idea suggestions of yours not mix odd technical requirements with interface ideas.

Second, why de-emphasize items?

NerdanelVampire: I didn't know there was a Japanese translation. This idea doesn't apply to Japanese at all since Japanese doesn't even [i]have[/i] capitalization. The idea can be expanded to non-ascii character sets but it may become more complicated and anyway ToME uses ascii. When I did my thing it was for a 8-bit Finnish ascii variant and I had to handle Å, Ä, and Ö separately.

The idea does not depend on C but rather ToME's C-code would be the right place to put it. (I wrote my code in C++ but any Turing complete language could accomplish the same.) It isn't the kind of thing that modulemakers would want to change, like spells, for example, and C is better than lua for speed. At most, modulemakers would have their own opinions on the best setting.

I think in the Current Situation Way too Many Things are Capitalized and It Is Worse than the German Language. I wrote about this in the poll thread on the message board. The current situation is 9 for caps and 5 against (including the one switched vote) so it looks like there is a significant minority that agrees with me. I tried to think up a reasonable compromise to satisfy everyone.

NeilStevens: OK, I can buy not capitalizing base types. Why not cap ego types (like Vampiric), though?

DarkGod: The choice of the language matters not, for the choice has been made for you already, yesterday I rewrote the object description functions into lua.

MayLith: Technically speaking, it's not "the" choice, but "our" choice in the matter.... All hail DarkGod!