Bracketed notations within strings

[Miloch]

Can someone please tell me what the purpose of a bracketed notation within a string means, when there is also a bracketed soundclip after it? I'm talking about, for example:

@100 = ~[ALORA 02] Aaah! Somebody hide me!~ [ALORA02]

I know the bracketed notation after the string refers to a soundclip, but what about the one within it? It doesn't print, it isn't a variable... what's the purpose?

[Nythrun]

Mnemonic or residue or blunder, take your pick. It does nothing.

[Miloch]

Ok, cheers... I guess I'll leave them if they do nothing, though an "anti-cruft" line of reasoning might argue for deletion...

[cmorgan]

Commenting.

 

I am now adding this to my own stuff for ease of translators when there aren't soundclips, too - that way when they work with a .tra, they can read who is suposed to be speaking (especially good for masculine/feminine languages)

 

~[ALORA] blah blah bloah~

~[KELDORN] blah blah bloah~

~blah blah bloah~

 

makes it easy to see who says what when working with an isolated .tra file - PC has the no-comment-included lines. (as proofreaders and translators do).

[devSin]

Yeah. If you have reason to display the brackets in the game (you never will), they can be escaped as expected ("\[" will cause the bracket to appear instead of being treated as a comment).

 

IIRC, IWD used comments more (where you can find stuff like notes for the voice actors and stuff in a lot of the strings), and BG2 didn't use them at all. BG/TotSC comments were mostly just labels for soundset strings (even the dialogue defaults and such that don't have sounds), although I think they commented a few item descriptions here and there.

[the bigg]

They will nudge --traify to work correctly in some cases, so it's better IMHO to leave them in (or add them to your files when a certain string will have translations).

[Miloch]

My only real issue is the leading space between the end bracket and the text. Does that show up in-game? Seems to from what I can tell... so can it be deleted safely?

[the bigg]

My only real issue is the leading space between the end bracket and the text. Does that show up in-game? Seems to from what I can tell... so can it be deleted safely?

Stick it to the end of your line rather than the beginning to workaround the issue

[devSin]

BioWare put the leading space in soundset strings in as a convention. There's always space between the "Name-" part and the string in the console window, however, so you don't need to preserve it.

[Miloch]

BioWare put the leading space in soundset strings in as a convention.

Yeah, I noticed that. I guess I'll leave them for consistency with the BioWare NPC soundclips.