put comma's in large numbers

[katateochi]

I find that the values for funds are really hard to read. Ok I'm dyslexic, so my ability to scan long digits is faulty (but I can't be the only lysdexic here)!

When presented with a number like 1536428.3 I find it hard to read quickly (without squinting at it). If it had a commas ie; 1,536,428.3 then suddenly it becomes easy to read.

Pretty please Squad, can you put commas into long numbers for us?

[M3tal_Warrior]

I'd recommend (thin) white spaces instead of punctuation, since in quite a lot of languages (including in most European languages) a comma is used for the decimal mark instead of the point as it is in English. This is why technical organizations nowadays recommend to use white spaces, to clarify the meaning.

I know this is ISO stuff, but if you do it, you can as well do it the right way. It's bad enough the USA still using feet and other odd measurements instead of following SI rules.

[Guest]

Why not just implement I18N for the GUI, add in region-specific dividers and such, and call it good?

[Sirrobert]

Either way, we need some devider to make it easier to see how big the numbers are

[Master Tao]

Why not just implement I18N for the GUI, add in region-specific dividers and such, and call it good?

This. If SQUAD seriously wants to support internationalization, they'll need to consider it sooner rather than later. Chinese numbers, for example, subdivide in multiples of ten thousand (1000,0000) rather than one thousand (10,000,000), adding another wrinkle to this problem.

[Felsmak]

I agree. Large numbers without any kind of digit division are hard to read even without dyslexia. That goes for phone numbers, too. There is a special place in the fiery, non-European netherland that Peter Pan accidentally brought his friends to when he was drunk for people who type large numbers without dividing the digits. Just like there is for people who write should of instead of should have, and make video tutorials where they type their instructions into Notepad.

[LethalDose]

I'm totally behind this.

I find that the values for funds are really hard to read. Ok I'm dyslexic, so my ability to scan long digits is faulty (but I can't be the only lysdexic here)!

When presented with a number like 1536428.3 I find it hard to read quickly (without squinting at it). If it had a commas ie; 1,536,428.3 then suddenly it becomes easy to read.

... having difficulty reading long numbers is a sign of dyslexia?

It's bad enough the USA still using feet and other odd measurements instead of following SI rules.

Plenty of us would change it if we could.

[Master Tao]

... having difficulty reading long numbers is a sign of dyslexia?

Short thread jack: Many adults with dyslexia have been told their whole lives that dyslexia is a visual processing disorder. That's simply not true. The biggest difficulties are holding speech sounds in memory and putting them together or taking them apart. Here's a good description of dyslexia.

LethalDose, thanks for taking a moment to question something that didn't make sense. If anyone wants to discuss dyslexia, I'll keep an eye on The Space Lounge.

[M3tal_Warrior]

Why not just implement I18N for the GUI, add in region-specific dividers and such, and call it good?

Because it's not necessary. There's international standards for technical/scientific usage.

Plenty of us would change it if we could.

I do believe you - but sadly there are always people who would gladly inhale toxic gas if that's what has been done since Chris Columbus in their country. National pride for the win!

[Guest]

Because it's not necessary. There's international standards for technical/scientific usage.

What about the rest of the text?

[katateochi]

Short thread jack: Many adults with dyslexia have ..........snip*.

Ok I think people are focusing too much on the dyslexia aspect of this. I shouldn't have even mentioned it, but as I did, it was simply a short-hand for something between dyslexia, dyscalculia and just generally being me; which results in a certain reading glitches. My type of learning disorder (to be as general as possible) means my eyes scan words too fast, great for skim reading, but I often jump over words or entire sentences. When reading long numbers the same thing happens.

It's often easier to just say dyslexia (as people have heard of it) rather than trying to explain something more specific and rambling on about saccadic eye movement.

Whatever that is called it's irrelevant, the point is that most people have some difficulty is parsing long strings of digits, some of us find it even harder. To that end numbers need to be presented with some division between groups of digits. And then we enter the can of worms that is international standards, so.....

Why not just implement I18N for the GUI, add in region-specific dividers and such, and call it good?

^^ This is a most sensible suggestion. regex, you're the voice of reason once again!

btw for those who've not heard of i18n, its a numeronym for internationalization (where 18 stands for the number of letters between the first i and last n) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization

[thylordroot]

I imagine the proper way of doing this (if Squad doesn't do it already) is to use System.String.Format() as described here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txafckwd%28v=vs.110%29.aspx). Any implementation like this should be locale aware, because just as English speakers have a preferred number format, so do other locales; As a trivial example, the Germans switch the role of the period and the comma when writing numbers (e.g., 1.234,5 instead of 1,234.5), and I think there are some countries that don't break digits into groups of three. String.Format() should use the system locale when processing numbers. To that effect, you can check to see if Squad does this by setting your system locale to do this. If not, then I agree that it is somewhat of an accessibility issue, but it would probably require a fairly large code audit to implement this because of the number of strings I would image KSP would have.

[LaytheAerospace]

I imagine the proper way of doing this (if Squad doesn't do it already) is to use System.String.Format() as described here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txafckwd%28v=vs.110%29.aspx). Any implementation like this should be locale aware, because just as English speakers have a preferred number format, so do other locales; As a trivial example, the Germans switch the role of the period and the comma when writing numbers (e.g., 1.234,5 instead of 1,234.5), and I think there are some countries that don't break digits into groups of three. String.Format() should use the system locale when processing numbers.

This is known broadly as I18N, and is a standard practice in software you expect to be used in multiple locales. It's not a difficult change to do it, but it is a lot of tedious work, because it can't be automated. You end up making tiny changes to literally all the front end code.

I expect we'll probably see this kind of polish when we get closer to 1.0.

[M3tal_Warrior]

What about the rest of the text?

Only useful if you plan to translate the whole program. Since that's quite a lot of work for a small game studio and the whole game is (I think) a bit too complex for small children it's not even necessary. I can't think of anyone playing this game and not being able to at least understand basic English (special stuff has to be learned either way; most people have no clue about orbital mechanics and the words describing it). Of course, in some distant future it might be translated, but I see no necessity atm to do so.

[Guest]

Only useful if you plan to translate the whole program.

Adding support for translation and regional formats would greatly increase the potential user base as well as open new avenues for the teaching aspect, something SQUAD should consider as they're partnering to that effect. It makes a lot of sense to add I18N.

[M3tal_Warrior]

Adding support for translation and regional formats would greatly increase the potential user base as well as open new avenues for the teaching aspect.

1. The potential user base has to be able to cope with the odd ends of orbital mechanics. This I'd consider works out for ages 14+. At this point almost everybody can at least have small conversations in English, having had that subject in school for 4 years (German school, that is, and I don't think other countries do that much different). So there is no 'expand user base' with localization.

2. Flight language is English. Even though Germany did a great deal of flight inventions we use mostly international words, although we do have words for all parts and functions. Hell, it took me 4 minutes to come up with 'Schubneigewinkel' for thrust vector. And I doubt more than 10% of the population is able to tell you what that means if you ask them to explain that out of the blue.

3. You know who's best in English in school around here? Gamers. Reason being: The moment we're able to understand English good enough to read and understand the mission statements in a game we buy the English version, for it is not censored. If I want to shoot .... soldiers I do like to see .... soldiers, and not soldiers in SS uniforms but weird flags (it's illegal to show the swastika in Germany outside a teaching/scientific context or art - computer games are not considered art). Also imagine playing CS:S without blood being displayed. So an English KSP teaches a lot, even language (and was by the way the first game/book in years that required me to use a dictionary/wikipedia again).

As a non-native English speaker I honestly do not see the point of a translation into my language - if it comes, I will still use the international version, mostly because I don't care as long as I understand what the program is telling me.

[Guest]

1. The potential user base has to be able to cope with the odd ends of orbital mechanics. This I'd consider works out for ages 14+. At this point almost everybody can at least have small conversations in English, having had that subject in school for 4 years (German school, that is, and I don't think other countries do that much different). So there is no 'expand user base' with localization.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about other countries but here in Oregon we have driver's education manuals that come in English, Spanish, Chinese, and IIRC Korean. I think it's a decent idea to add internationalization support because, at least around these parts, other languages are used.

2. Flight language is English. Even though Germany did a great deal of flight inventions we use mostly international words, although we do have words for all parts and functions. Hell, it took me 4 minutes to come up with 'Schubneigewinkel' for thrust vector. And I doubt more than 10% of the population is able to tell you what that means if you ask them to explain that out of the blue.

Contracts language is not flight language and there is a lot of additional text within the game that does not directly deal with flight.

3. You know who's best in English in school around here? Gamers. Reason being: The moment we're able to understand English good enough to read and understand the mission statements in a game we buy the English version, for it is not censored. If I want to shoot .... soldiers I do like to see .... soldiers, and not soldiers in SS uniforms but weird flags (it's illegal to show the swastika in Germany outside a teaching/scientific context or art - computer games are not considered art). Also imagine playing CS:S without blood being displayed. So an English KSP teaches a lot, even language (and was by the way the first game/book in years that required me to use a dictionary/wikipedia again).

This is an excellent point, at least in regards to Germany, but I would suggest that internationalization support would increase the draw for people who are not "hardcore" gamers elsewhere, such as young students or the parents thereof.

[Sirrobert]

3. You know who's best in English in school around here? Gamers. Reason being: The moment we're able to understand English good enough to read and understand the mission statements in a game we buy the English version, for it is not censored. If I want to shoot .... soldiers I do like to see .... soldiers, and not soldiers in SS uniforms but weird flags (it's illegal to show the swastika in Germany outside a teaching/scientific context or art - computer games are not considered art). Also imagine playing CS:S without blood being displayed. So an English KSP teaches a lot, even language (and was by the way the first game/book in years that required me to use a dictionary/wikipedia again).

Ha, that takes me back.

I learned english from Red Alert 2 and Pokemon before we ever had english lessons

[M3tal_Warrior]

manuals that come in English, Spanish, Chinese, and IIRC Korean.

We have that too - but who reads manuals anyway

Contracts language is not flight language and there is a lot of additional text within the game that does not directly deal with flight.

Hmm, there is a point, yepp. But I fear translating those contracts will require native speakers, the texts are too complicated (talking about linguistics here). If Squad has any sense here they would give that to the community, maybe naming the main translators in a special thanks page or so in return, or in easter eggs. Hell, why not, translating the game would be fun, I think, and for guys like me pretty easy.

young students or the parents thereof.

Young (university) students are required to be fluent in English, for it is the scientific language worldwide (for Chemistry that was different prior to WW2, but that's another story), and most people younger than 60 can speak that too, if they've not lived in the CSSR.

Like I said, I don't really see the need, alas with the community it could be pretty easy to achieve.

I learned english from Red Alert 2 and Pokemon before we ever had english lessons

For me - being older - it was fiddling around with the computer itself, Registry, command line, ... Afterwards games kicked in, MechWarrior 2, HyperBlade, Interstate 76, Spy Game, Commandos 2, MDK. Pterry Pratchett did the rest (with the Discworld novels)

Edited August 4, 2014 by M3tal_Warrior

[katateochi]

*snip

3. You know who's best in English in school around here? Gamers. Reason being: .....snip*

As a native English speaker I'd not thought about that, interesting point.

We have that too - but who reads manuals anyway

Hmm, there is a point, yepp. But I fear translating those contracts will require native speakers, the texts are too complicated (talking about linguistics here). If Squad has any sense here they would give that to the community, maybe naming the main translators in a special thanks page or so in return, or in easter eggs. Hell, why not, translating the game would be fun, I think, and for guys like me pretty easy.

snip*

^^This is actually a reason to use i18n.

Even if you don't initially intend to translate the program, using i18n makes you separate the human readable content from the code of the interface. You typically end up with all readable text collected into a single structured document and that can greatly help with proof reading and maintaining it.

If later you do choose to translate it you've already got all the human specific stuff completely separate from the code and you can then get linguists in who have no understanding of the code to just translate the documents. As you say, I think Squad should out-source the translation to the community, but without i18n that becomes problematic as you have to bring more people under NDA and into the code base. Using i18n means the translators don't need to go anywhere near the code so out-sourcing to the community is simpler.

[edit]

however, the discussion about translation (as interesting as it is) is kinda off topic for this thread. Complete text translation is something worth considering, but initially its just the presentation of different numerical formats that I feel needs addressing. i18n is a possible solution to that and implementing it for numerical formats would start paving the way for further i18n implementation later (but that is a whole other can-o-worms!)

[/edit]

Edited August 4, 2014 by katateochi

[Bobnova]

I feel like it should be pointed out that this is a Mexican PR company making this video game. It's not a bunch of Americans who have never had to learn another language.

If anybody is likely to be aware of language difficulties with regards to userbase and audience, they are.

[M3tal_Warrior]

I'm pretty sure it's no Public Relations company, but we all know they're Mexican for sure.

[Bobnova]

I'd call marketing part of PR, personally.

http://www.squad.com.mx/SquadSite/index.htm

[vexx32]

Yeah, Squad's primary business is still PR and marketing. Apparently they've done a split and are now legally two separate companies. I suppose it makes sense to keep games development and marketing separate to a point. Just think, though; HarvesteR was on the verge of quitting his job when they told him they'd pay him to have a go at developing KSP. And now he's essentially the one initially responsible for the company creating a completely separate offshoot for games development.

More on-topic, though... Implementing this should be something of a no-brainer, really -- when dealing with large numbers, thousands separators make it a heck of a lot easier to read. Counting zeroes is a lot easier when they're properly grouped.

[M3tal_Warrior]

Well, Wiki lists them as indie video game company in the disambiguation page, and I'm quite confident they'd update that info if it wasn't correct. PR is part of being an indie game studio, since you're on your own regarding almost everything from development to publishing/selling.