Messages & languages

Every text Voxen shows a player lives in messages/<language>.yml. en_US and pl_PL ship by default.

How a player’s language is chosen

1. The language they picked with /lang <language>, if any.
2. Their client language, when a matching file exists.
3. default-language from config.yml.

/lang auto clears the manual choice and goes back to following the client. The console always uses default-language.

Adding a language

1. Copy an existing file under the new locale name:

   cp messages/en_US.yml messages/de_DE.yml

2. Translate the values. Keys and placeholders must stay as they are.

3. Run /voxen reload. Clients set to German now get the new file, and /lang de_DE picks it manually.

The prefix

The first key in every file is used in front of most plugin messages:

plugins/Voxen/messages/en_US.yml

prefix: "<gray>[<aqua>Voxen</aqua>]</gray> "

Set it to an empty string to drop the prefix everywhere at once.

Placeholders in messages

Each message accepts its own placeholders and they are not interchangeable. A few common ones:

Placeholder	Appears in
<player>	anything about a player
<channel>	channel messages, already rendered from display-name
<remaining>	cooldowns and mute expiry
<reason>	mute messages
<amount>	list headers

chat-cooldown: "<red>Wait <white><remaining></white> before sending another message."
muted-player: "<green>Muted <white><player></white> in <white><channel></white>."

Caution

Removing a placeholder is fine, inventing one is not: an unknown tag is left in the text verbatim. If a message comes out with a stray <something> in it, that is why.

Updating

New messages added by a plugin update are appended to every language file on startup, in English. Your translations and comments are left alone, so after an update you only have to translate the new lines.