[Non-fatal] Contact Window Weirdness

[Redlynne]

So yesterday I was running (blue) Ouroboros Flashbacks again and was working my way through the Night Ward arcs and was in the Part 7 arc when ... well ... THIS happened.



Now, I may not be the best bug hunter out there ... but I'm not accustomed to seeing the "Call" button on Contacts in the window being replaced with ... P518896114 ... which I'm assuming is a pointer that has been incorrectly labeled (probably due to a typo in the syntax of the coding). I figure that this specific superficial glitch is something left over from Paragon Studios, rather than a "new bug" introduced by Rebirth staff.

I would like to think that the fix for this would be relatively trivial ... but ... with how spaghettified the code base is, there are no guarantees that correcting this trivial (but user facing) bug would be as simple as we would all like to assume.

[Draggynn]

I suspect Rebirth hasn't done anything special here, and so this will be the same as the Ouro code.  You'll actually see this happen quite a bit (and even would occasionally when the game was live).
What you're seeing here is what's commonly referred to in CoH as a "Pstring" due to the leading P.  This is a key to a database of key value pairs that provides the text that should go here.  The fact that the text isn't showing up likely means that somewhere either where the pstring is called or in the database of pairs the keys don't match and so the game can't figure out what text should go here.

In fact, almost all text in the game, is done using the Pstring replacements.  The game is configured this way so that you can do language localization by just updating the database of pstrings and not have to touch any of the other code.

[Redlynne]

That ... makes perfect sense.
Thank you for that.