The Mana World Forums

I hope this is not being too picky or anything, it's just something i've noticed and haven't seen discussed here yet.

When we pick up, say, an apple, for example, it shows in the chat box "You picked up a Apple". My suggestion would be to change the first line to just "You picked up" and then the item name to be "an Apple". This would look more correct. Same thing with "an Arrow" or " an Iron Ore" or for items in the plural, such as "Miner Gloves", so it doesn't show up "you picked up a Miner Gloves".

I understand it would mean changing a lot, i guess, but it would look a bit better.

Thank you

PS: I hope this is the right place for this suggestion.

Some NPCs actually do this. But that is part of their own specific scripts.

I agree it would be nice to show correct grammatical agreements, but if this is to be considered I would like to raise two things to remember:

1. Not all words can be analysed from their outer appearance (especially loanwords), e.g. consider “antenna/antennae” and “an NPC Blouse”.
2. If support is to be given to other languages than current Americo-British English (with an international second language feeling to it), additional care needs to be taken to agreement and sentence structure in whole. (Word per word translations are generally impossible to get right when we move beyond the Indo-European languages.)

Yes, things like this can be saved in the item database, but this will only scale well if one language is supported contents wise, I believe.

A better way is to change the "You picked up a [item]" sentence to something else that is correct in all cases. Something like "Picked up: [item] ([x])". Where [x] is the amount you picked up. It does IMO sound stupid though.

you get [x] (item)

you get [1] (miner gloves)


even beter

you lootsteal someone else's [x] (item)