Zerli:
I think the info you want is scattered in bits and pieces across this thread... I'll cut and paste it here for you.
1. Text character (length) limits
Title name: max characters = 240, exceeding this causes the event to briefly flash on the screen (if the player is the country with the event with too long of a title) but not to actually fire. If this is an AI nation, the event does not fire.
Description text: max characters = 1020, exceeding this causes invalid references upon new campaign or savegame load-up.
Option text: max characters = 70, exceeding this causes the text to become squished together and garbled.
2. Point-of-view, case (person), and tense
Title name: should be in the present tense, and start with the word 'The', or a country name, or other workable word. Only words of proper names should be capitalized, no punctuation at the end. The title should accurately describe the event, but not explain or define its terms (that is what the description is for)
e.g. "The Nomonhan Incident"
e.g. "Germany sends advisors and technological support to Nationalist Spain"
Description text: MUST be written in the past tense, and events should generally give the same descriptions in all cases, if they happen to multiple countries. The descriptions should clearly define the event title, and include sufficient historical or or ahistorical background for those who like to read (those who don't will skip it anyway). This area has a lot of space as far as maximum characters, so the majority of info should fit in here, and as we know the character limit AND the results of exceeding that limit (makes it obvious to correct these bugs), we should add as much descriptive text as possible.
e.g. "On January 1st, 1936, Germany became involved in a grand campaign in the game Hearts of Iron. After having the Treaty of Versailles imposed on them, as a result of losing the Second World War, the High command had to choose what research to develop, blah blah blah blah.... etc etc"
Option titles: Should be written in the future tense from the neutral or first person plural, and should be long enough to accurately describe the effects of each particular option. This is somewhat difficult, given the 70 character limit. If an effect is WAR!, it should say so on the button. I know that the information also pops up during mouseover of the option buttons, but those descriptions are also sometimes unclear, or in the case of sleep_event commands, completely unstated. The most important seen and unseen effects should be delineated on the button. The sentence should not end in punctuation.
This is where the text should be slanted from the country's particular angle. The text should read like the player is the head commander in chief of all decisions regarding these events. I think this reads better to the player, as they are aware of what country they are playing. I think that using direct commands (neutral) or the word 'We' (fpp) tends to personalize the choice better than using the third person. The player should be getting the feeling that he/she is the Head Commander making *Important* decisions for the country, when reading the option text
e.g. Neutral: "Declare war on Japan; end the trade agreement"
e.g. Plural: "We will not forget this insult; accept the British demands"
3. Our efforts on the TCTmod
Team-C.O.R.E.-text, composed of myself, PhilK, and Jkkelley (we are also looking for more help!), are putting in a lot of effort to unify event descriptions for case and tense, as well as correct spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and typos. This was born of my general feeling, when playing the C.O.R.E. mod, that some of the events needed a little superficial 'touch-up'.
Our work process is this: when a new version of C.O.R.E. is soon to be released, we integrate all of the corrections and changes made from the past version's event files into the new version's event files. After release of the new version, we may go through several versions of typo corrections, etc as hotfixes. This carries on until the next C.O.R.E. release is almost ready, at which point integration starts again.
We divide the work such that different files and tasks are assigned such that work is not repeated, and that changes we make are unified among each member's version of the files. This is sometimes an effort in communication micromanagement.
Once we have finished a particular version, we will put it up on the wiki for testing and either to be released with the new version of C.O.R.E. or try to have it released as a hotfix.
Getting the word out to people on the format to use for writing events would be highly helping in cutting down the work we have to do.
Anything else?
JesseJames
