Alneyan
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Well, I won't get any awards in the "original subject name" department.

So, I was wondering about how useful a translation of DROD would be; I am French myself, and heard one time too many the "if it's in English I ain't gonna play it" - though DROD is not exactly a prose-heavy game, and does not feature intricate prose and arcane words. Very few games are released solely in English here, but I wouldn't know if it really hurts sales or not.

DROD wouldn't be too difficult to translate, near as I can tell: the game itself does not have a lot of text, the help files are relatively short, and I do not think the game makes calls to language dependent "things". Freespace or Civ 3 had very poor translations that made all English mods incomptabible with the French version, and the other way around: it would be the equivalent of having DROD call for a roach in English, a cafard in French, a whatchamacallit in Thingamajig, and so on.

Problem is, would it be really beneficial for the game? I think it could help persuade some friends to try DROD out, but I am not sure it it would have much of an impact beyond that. And of course, I do not know if Caravel has any such plans or opinions (perhaps DROD will be unleashed worldwide right as I am typing those words).

ErikH2000
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It's my goal to have a way for people to easily make translations available as an effort independent of the main project, so that we don't bottleneck it. It's going to require some programming work, and I think now is probably a bad time to start it since we've got the team programmers busy on important things.

I'm feeling rather guilty about sitting on KDD translations in French and Russian for over 2 years. The French one was written by a father who wanted his son to be able to play DROD with French text. Ohhhhh, man that makes me feel bad. Gutpunch bad.

What I'd like to have is... aw, forget it. There's just too much going on. If another Matt Schikore or Mike Rimer jumped up, we could maybe do it, but we're spread pretty thin right now.

-Erik

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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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Alneyan
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I see. *Cowers in fear at the mention of programming*

Perhaps non-English help files could be provided, either on the site or along with the game? Those are .html files, so it shouldn't require any programming, and it should be far easier to play without understanding the story than without understanding how the game works. If you are interested, I should be able to translate those files.

Thanks for your answer!

Znirk
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Interesting. I noticed while scripting my Film Festival hold that character scripts refuse to handle characters with common European diacritics -- at least I couldn't get an à, but didn't investigate any further.

Now you say that there are translations to (accent-heavy) French and (presumably cyrillic) Russian -- so is it only the scripting engine that has problems with this?

Alneyan
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I gather those translations weren't implemented in the game, so accents didn't have the opportunity of making some mischief; they are probably one of those programming annoyances Erik spoke of though.

Syntax
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Or that the scripting engine only accepts 7-bit ascii (ie non-extended)...

mrimer
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Znirk wrote:
Interesting. I noticed while scripting my Film Festival hold that character scripts refuse to handle characters with common European diacritics -- at least I couldn't get an à, but didn't investigate any further.

Now you say that there are translations to (accent-heavy) French and (presumably cyrillic) Russian -- so is it only the scripting engine that has problems with this?

Naw, the scripting engine and almost all of the game supports 16-bit Unicode. The problem here is that the special fonts we use in-game are not Unicode-extended fonts. They would need to be replaced with a fuller-set Unicode font to get those characters to show correctly.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.