MESSAGES Format (Fury of the Furries)
| Format type | Text |
|---|---|
| Text purpose | Story |
| Line endings | CRLF |
| Character set | ASCII |
| Games |
Textes de messages TINIES II Version Française version anglaise, peut etre convertie en d'autres langues sans difficultes, la mise en page est recalculee. txxtlangue English txxtintertableaux ***v***|***a*** ***l***|level ***x*** ! txxt***v*** You are entering Discover Take a trip to Ready to wreak havoc in Let's go mad in We'll have fun in
This format stores text used in throughout the game. There is a different file for each of the 6 supported languages.
Encoding
The comment on top of the file has a "ç" character in "Version Française". This character only gets shown correctly when interpreting the file in Macintosh's 'Roman' encoding (or similar European encodings).
However, the actual game text in the file never seems to use any special characters, so for all practical purposes, the file format can be considered to use ASCII encoding.
File format
At the top of the file is a comment section, written by the original developers.
The file is divided into sections each of which starts with a label line that begins with the text 'txxt', such as 'txxtlangue' or 'txxtgameover'. The end of the section ends with a blank line
The game looks for sections with specific labels. If the section contains more than one line, then one of the lines will be used. For the descriptions of the levels, the lines chosen is based on the level being played, after the lines run out, it starts using them again from the top. For 'txxtgameover' and 'txxttimeout' a random line is chosen.
If the line contains a pipe (|) character, that is replaced by a line break when rendered in game.
Most of the text strings are obvious.
- the name of the language.
- menu text.
- names of job roles in the credits page.
A less obvious set of string is used to describe each level. Each level of the game is preceded by a message rendered on an image of a parchment scroll. The first level says: 'You are entering the incredible desert level 1 !'
This is actually composed of 4 or 5 separate strings.
To handle the grammar of the different languages supported, 'txxtintertableaux' gives a format string into which several substrings are substituted. In English, this format string is '***v***|***a*** ***l***|level ***x*** !'. The German format is slightly more complex '***v***|***a*** Ebene|***x*** ***p*** ***l******s***!'
You can see that it has two line breaks (the pipe character) and the final text is made up from strings selected from 4 other lists in the file.
- 'txxt***v***' is the verb. e.g. 'You are entering' or 'Discover'
- 'txxt***a***' is the adjective. e.g. 'The incredible' or 'the furry'
- 'txxt***l***' is the stage of the game. e.g. 'Desert' or 'Lagoon'
- 'txxt***x***' is the number of the level in the stage. e.g. '1' or '2'
- 'txxt***s***' is for declining the stage name e.g. 'Wald' becomes 'Waldes'
- 'txxt***p***' is for the gendered article. e.g. 'der' or 'des' in German; 'du' or 'de la' in French.
The last section of the file is labelled 'txxtfin' and contains no lines.
Credits
This file format was reverse engineered by carbon14. If you find this information helpful in a project you're working on, please give credit where credit is due. (A link back to this wiki would be nice too!)