Text convention between Enhanced Edition and Classic Engine

[Roberciiik]

Hello David,

Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate comes with few new text formats in-game, like standardized items' descriptions or asterics in stage directions.

I understand that it is a problem to keep and maintain both version of tra files for classic and EE engines. However, keeping only one style (EE in this case), again, breaks backward compatibility and immersion. Would you mind adding optional handling of such additional files? As you are handling all translations by WITH_TRA is would be very easy to add a non-breaking change to load extra files. It's fine to be either file-ee.tra or file-classic.tra convention. 

As far as I tried, It could be done by adding switch to lib_tools.tpa (and probably twice to always.tph where setup & shared.tra are loaded), here is a pseudocode:

ACTION_IF enhanced_edition BEGIN
 WITH_TRA "english/%tra%.tra" "LANGUAGE/%tra%.tra" "LANGUAGE/%tra%-ee.tra"
  LAF <component entry>
 END
END ELSE BEGIN
 WITH_TRA "english/%tra%.tra" "LANGUAGE/%tra%.tra"
  LAF <component entry>
 END
END

Above approach makes *-ee.tra files optional, so only those files/components where are differences between EE and classic engines should be created.

What do you think?

Thanks!

[DavidW]

No, sorry. I see the issue, and the attraction of doing it this way, but I think it would be a pain to maintain and has the potential to give rise to more serious issues in due course - notably, it doubles the risk of an item/description mismatch, which is much more serious. (And, iirc, it's not as if the pre-EE game is all that self-consistent here anyway.)

You could always release a micro-mod that installs after SCS and corrects the descriptions.

[Roberciiik]

Yeah, I had to try in the source first

I will probably make such micro-mod to patch some of SCS stringrefs.

Thanks anyway.