It may be better to place some description files in other directories

[Changesite]

It may be better to place some description files in other directories, such as/dat/description and/dat/database. This way, the files will be more organized, some hard coded information may be easier to maintain, and the information in the /description and /database directories will be easier to translate, making it easier to promote the game to players in other languages with the official version.

1. Description of artifact effects in art-data.txt. Artifact not only have their own description, but also have description for its effects. The former is located in the unrand.txt file in the/dat/description directory, while the latter is located in the art-data.txt file in the /source directory. If the latter is also placed in the/dat/description directory, it may be more uniform. The text files in the source directory are all Cpp language program files, while art-data.txt is an exception.
   

   

2. Description of the effect of the item in describe.cc. Scarves, orbs, and randarts not only have their own description, but also have description for their effects. The former is located in the items.txt file in the/dat/description directory, while the latter is located in the art describe.cc file in the /source directory. If the hard coded descriptions in descripte.cc could also be transferred to the/dat/description directory, it would be easier to maintain. By the way, there are many types of scrolls, potions, rings, and amulets, but each type has its own descriptive text, some of which are also very interesting. But scarves and orbs, although there are various types, have the same descriptive text. If they also have different descriptions, the game may be more immersive.
   

   

3. Quickstart.md, crawl.6, macro_guide.txt, options_guide.txt, changelog.txt, and apt-tmpl.txt, apt-tmpl wide.txt in the/docs/template directory are displayed in the Instructions menu. However, the FAQ information, which is also in this menu, is stored in/dat/database/FAQ.txt. I hope these files can be saved in the same directory as FAQ.txt to facilitate display in other languages, or the docs directory can be set to be translated into other languages like the /description and /database directories.
   

   
   
   
   

I really like this game and am also translating it, hoping to let more friends have access to this game. Thanks a lot to developers!

[advil]

It definitely seems like it would be good to be able to translate these. However, I don’t think moving the primary version of all of them out of the main repository documentation directory into a deep subdirectory is a good idea. (In fact, I don’t think any of them would be ideally moved, and possibly FAQ.txt shouldn’t be where it is.) So my preference would be to add support for translations (perhaps in a new directory like source/dat/docs, although the current docs folder might work) that correspond to things in the repository main documentation folder. This is a bit non-trivial as currently documentation files are just accessed directly, not via the database API.

I think it would be reasonable, and also get more technical eyes, to open this either as a bug report in the main repository (the bug being that certain kinds of in-game documentation don’t support translations by the standard means) and/or a PR that tries to address this!