Philippeatbay
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Joined: 12/3/2014
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Words painted on the map are there for color and don't effect gameplay, though they can be aesthetically disconcerting. I'm still groaning over some of the howlers in Alea Jacta Est which are too labor-intensive to correct by modding. Hopefully there isn't too much of that here.
If I understand correctly, the problem with the word 'Berkshire' that you see on the map is that it should be 'Surrey' and a bit further to the east. The word 'Berkshire' would probably best appear if it were written running NNW to SSE along the right bank of the Thames, possibly in a slightly smaller text size. But that could get a little crowded because it might have to appear under the icon for the town of Reading. Since that would put it right next to the word 'Surrey' (which you would see in the best of all possible worlds), the map might start to look a bit on the cluttered side.
I for one would rather Miguel focused his limited time on addressing issues of substance, and circle back for the cosmetic issues later on. I would think that ironing out the text that appears under the tool tips is a bit more pressing, so it would probably be better if he concentrated on file wrangling rather than re-painting bitmaps. I think it important that the tool tip label read 'Reading" and not 'Newbury' when you run the tool tip over the town icon, even if the name of the region the town of Reading is located in happens to be Newbury. Admittedly we've strayed into country inhabited by Emerson's hobgoblin, but sometimes clarity has to trump elegance.
Remembering to fix what shows up when you run a tool tip accross a town or a region is not as easy as it would first appear when you have a host of other fires to put out. People can drop useful suggestions for changes into these threads, but do we really want Miguel spending all of his time combing the forum for things he might have left out, when that energy would be better spent on refining the game's internal mechanics? I can still remember the howls of outrage from across the pond when AACW first came out many years ago, and people would look in vain for the county they lived in only to find it carrying the name of a neighboring county in a different state. It was only after people set up a special thread for boo-boos (technical term) that all the suggested emendations started getting collected in one place, so that the poor overworked programmer could work them in en passant when he needed a break from what was going on under the hood.
If such a thread were to get started, an important thing to remember is that things change over time, even in the British Isles. I made a Dark Ages village names mod for the Mount and Blade Viking game once, and in making it had to look up a couple of hundred place names just to make sure they were actually in use during that period. The first thing that struck me (after I had waded through all of the Anglo-Saxon) was how many towns and villages could be traced back to the eighth and ninth century. But the second thing that struck me was how different the landscape was in terms of which towns were important and where they were located compared to either late Roman Britain or the High Middle Ages. So just because you drive past a big town on the way to work every morning doesn't mean it was important (or even in existence) in the 17th century. The place names in the British Isles don't tend to change that much, but you have to research the history of each and every one of them just to be sure you know what was actually supposed to be there.
Under the rubric of managing our expectations, it's probably worth remembering that it took more than half a dozen patches to smooth out the region names in AACW (American Civil War I as opposed to the current Civil War II). With any luck it won't take anywhere near that long for ECW, but I'd be surprised if it happened overnight. Miguel may manage to pull off that hat trick, but I'm not sure we want him to.
< Message edited by Philippe at bay -- 6/1/2017 8:06:26 PM >
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Is ECW ready yet? - 
Not sure where I am - as usual.
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