ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hullo

I'm pondering, do you people prefer
"a Small Torch" or "a small torch"
"a Dagger" or "a dagger"

with ego items:
"a Vampiric Broken Sword" or "a vampiric broken sword"
" a Scimitar of Slaying" or "a scimitar of slaying"

with artifacts:
" The Small Sword 'Sting'" or "The small sword 'Sting'"
"The Mage Staff of Absorption" or "The mage staff of Absorption"

So ?

Strictly speaking, if it's not a proper noun then it should be de-capped...

Having said that, I prefer the Title Caps, just for the "look" of it...

I prefer caps, makes reading inventory and equipment less confusing (at least for me )

I think capital letters should only be used for artifacts (and then for all letters, eg The Something of Something Else). It seems to make more sense IMHO.

Well, I like 'science style' - that is, capitalise the important words.

So I would go for a 'Small Sword, ' but ' a small sword of Slaying' or 'a Vampiric small sword.'

Which is going to be too much trouble to code, I know.

So if forced to choose simply, I'd go for noncaps. Overuse of capitals grates (it's like misplaced apostrophes).

Ravenred wrote:Strictly speaking, if it's not a proper noun then it should be de-capped...

Having said that, I prefer the Title Caps, just for the "look" of it...

I agree with Ravenred. Technically speaking, it should be de-capped, but I prefer it the other way for readability.... and that's weird, since I normally prefer lowercase.

I am agree with a Keeper. Caps are better

I prefer de-capping. It doesn't matter so much in the game, although I prefer without caps. I don't mind capitalization in the equipment and inventory lists. I do mind it a little in the messages since those are supposed to be sentences rather than just object names in a list. But when writing about the game I get a severe capital overdose and in many cases don't bother to game-capitalize and instead attempt to grammar-capitalize.

"I lift my Vampiric Long Sword of the Noldor and skewer a dozen Blue Icky Things along with Wormtongue, Agent of Saruman."

"I lift my vampiric long sword of the Noldor and skewer a dozen blue icky things along with Wormtongue, agent of Saruman."

Isn't this version much clearer than if I had capitalized 11/15 of the title-capitalizable words? Now think a whole page of that stuff.

One-sided grammar-capitalized leads to inconsistencies and game-capitalizing leads to headache and inclarity, all of which are bad things.

By the way, since DeathMold is obviously bad grammar, should I write Death Mold, death mold, or deathmold?

Hey Irdis, if you really think like that your sig should read:

Here is your Small Rusty Sword, Fumblefingers!

Well, on my first thought I voted on Caps, but take one Caps vote out and add one non-caps vote in. Now, my greatest concern is consistency.
"a metal Boomerang" was hurting my eyes for about 4 versions, before I remembered to report it. Anyway, now we have things like
"an Indestructible Ring of Speed"
"The Pair of Hard Leather Boots of Nevrast" and the question is
Whether we Like to Have downs And Hills everywhere Or
rather have everything in nice non-different font, maybe except for significant issues - like Artifact Names.

I wrote down an idea in the wiki that could function as a compromise if someone bothers to code it. We could even have the capitalization mode as an option.

I'm wondering....



Anyhow, back to the topic ...


Is either correct?? The small beetles crawling over my floors are merely small (adjective) and beetles (noun). However, I've got a feeling that long swords and small swords may be, despite the appearence, a recognised noun. Or not. Or maybe a bit of both...

Hmm. I prefer capitals for no particular reason!

I suspect this discussion may wind up along the same avenue as ASCII vs. tiles.

When first looking at the poll I found myself preferring Caps, but then I realised that this was only a reflex due to being so very used to seeing it written that way in ToME. The low caps version is actually much easier on the eye.

When talking about artifact there is another problem. How do we seperate name from description. That is, with "the short sword 'Sting'" only Sting is capped because Sting is the actual name of the artifact preceded by a description of the type of weapon. This is in line with the naming for normal weapons.

With "the mage staff of Absorption" the question is: What is the name and what is a description. Absorption isn't the name of the Artifact, so why should that only be capped? Wouldn't we end up with "the Mage staff of Absorption" or if we want to get picky, possible "the mage staff 'the Mage staff of absorption'".

Maybe Artifacts should change name when ID'ed so that "a short sword" became simply "Sting" and "a mage staff" became "the Mage staff of Absorption".

Just some thoughts to confuse the matter.