Translations

Shopro · Post by **Shopro** » Sat Jan 17, 2004 3:35 am

Hi, this is my first post here,

Is it possible to do a translation for U7 in a language such as Japanese through Exult? Or are such features(System fonts, etc) not available yet in Exult?

Just wondering:)

Thanks for the great software, dev team

-Shopro

Post by **wjp** » Sat Jan 17, 2004 2:41 pm

We'll have to improve our font support first. Currently we really only support english characters, and with a bit of a hack also accented characters.

For Japanese we should probably look into supporting UTF-8 or something like that, although I'm not quite sure yet on how that would/should work exactly.

Shopro · Post by **Shopro** » Sat Jan 17, 2004 3:22 pm

Thanks for the quick reply.

ah, I see.

I guess, having the engine display text in the default system fault font would do the trick. I would try to do this myself if I knew C...

If in any time, this is implemented, I'd give translating to Japanese a go:)

Cheers!

-Shopro

Post by **wjp** » Sat Jan 17, 2004 3:37 pm

The default system font is something that is very platform-specific, I'm afraid.

Post by **drcode** » Sat Jan 17, 2004 7:38 pm

What we could do is allow use of specific TT or Type1 font files. We could use the Pongo package, along with Freetype, to display UTF8 text. The two problems would be:

1. It wouldn't look as good as the custom 2-color bitmaps that are used in U7.
2. Adding Pongo would make Exult somewhat bigger, so we might want to make it an optional part of the configuration.

Post by **drcode** » Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:57 pm

Er, make that "Pango".

Shopro · Post by **Shopro** » Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:24 am

wip, DrCode:
I see the problems concerning the support of these languages...

How many people out there would be willing to do a translation in their 2-byte font language:)?

-Shopro

Post by **drcode** » Sun Jan 18, 2004 11:28 pm

Wouldn't it be funny if some of the Origin execs. suddenly noticed that U7 had been translated into, say, Japanese, Russian, and Arabic?

Shopro · Post by **Shopro** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 3:14 am

DrCode:
Actually, every Ultima but U7 has been properly translated into Japanese.

There is a SFC(SNES) Japanese version of U7, but since the story is quite a bit different, it can't just be copy/pasted to make a translation for Exult.

I will use it as a base if I am to do the translation, though.

What other languages has u7 been translated into?

-Shopro

Post by **Dominus** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 3:27 am

http://exult.info/faq.php#u7_versions
Apart from these official Versions, Artaxerxes and his team finished a french translation of SI.

Post by **drcode** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 8:57 am

I wonder how many people would be interested in U7 in their native language?

Shopro · Post by **Shopro** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 9:55 am

Dominus: Ah, I see. thanks.
hmm, not many asian languages I guess.

DrCode:
Thanks for your interest:)

Post by **drcode** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 8:12 pm

No, really, I'm curious as to how many people might be willing to buy Ultima7 if it were translated into their language. I've got this funny notion of approaching Origin to see if we could, perhaps, get a license to sell copies, so that the people who do the translation (which is a huge amount of work), and maybe we developers:-), could make some money from the effort.

Shopro · Post by **Shopro** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 11:12 pm

DrCode:
lol, wow, yeah, that'd be great if Origin accepted:)
Lots of incentive to get the translation done!

In Japan, there is a "Ultima Complete" package(http://www.japan.ea.com/ultcom/) which contains all the main Ultimas from 1 to 9. To my disappointment every game *but* U7 was in Japanese.

I found that very unprofessional of EA Games, and felt the whole "package" was just another easy scheme to make money:( Does EA really lack the resources to translate the game?

-Shopro

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:40 am

EA probably lacked the source for U7.

WishStone Dragon (not logged) · Tue Jan 20, 2004 1:05 am

...and if their translations would have been ANYTHING like the "Translation server" they use for UO, you wouldn't have understood a word what was going on anyhow

If you need a translator for german, I'd be willing to help, but I could only offer the text translation, I nither run a german U7 (due to said lacks in "localization") nor am I a Programming whizz.

Post by **nadir** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 1:08 am

There is a SDL_ttf package which we could use which has all sorts of neat functions for showing TrueType text, including UTF-8 support.
I believe there is an avatar.ttf font lying around: we could have two methods for displaying text: shape-based (as it is now) and ttf-based (with custom fonts).

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 4:40 am

additionnally, I shouldn't reveal it so early, but I'm making a web based tool to translate u7. I've designed it so that any language doable with ultima are supportable (like putting the accentuated letters or more into the first frames of the alphabet shape).

A quick peak can be seen at: Warning only view it with Mozilla (full or firebird). Do not view it with IE! You've been warned.

http://si-french.sourceforge.net/transl ... _edit.html

it is obviously not finished but I'm getting there I've finished designing the database and I'm currently coding the php and a few other things around.

Artaxerxes

Post by **wjp** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 4:49 am

I'd like to get rid of that silly requirement to put accented characters in unused frames at the start. I can personally see no reason why they couldn't just be somewhere after 0x80 like in iso8859-1.

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 5:04 am

because of a limitation for # of frames per shapes (I believe).

Artaxerxes

Post by **wjp** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 5:10 am

That's a limitation we should get rid of then

I'll take a closer look when I get home later today.

Emperor · Post by **Emperor** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 5:21 am

Translating Ultima 7 into different languages is a great thing to do. I've read somewhere on this forum that a Usecode implementation is possible in Exult. Would that make a Russian translation possible? Is anyone working on it?

Post by **wjp** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 5:23 am

Emperor: yes, somebody is working on a russian translation. Search the forum for 'russian' for more details.

Artaxerxes: speaking of russian, I seem to remember getting rid of that 128 character limitation for the russian symbols a while back.

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 5:26 am

yeah I remember that too. Wouldn't you want to make it after 1.2 though?

Artaxerxes

Post by **wjp** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 5:28 am

Make what after 1.2?

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 6:06 am

the ability to support # frames > 128 per shapes.

Artaxerxes

Post by **wjp** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 6:28 am

As I said earlier, I'm fairly sure that (at least for font shapes) that limitation has been removed already (april 2003).

Post by **artaxerxes** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 7:45 am

in this case, there won't be a need to put accentuated letters in unused part of the shape.

I'll try it in a minute and I'll let you know.

Artaxerxes

Post by **drcode** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 8:38 am

Nadir: I'll have to take a look at SDL_ttf. I've worked with Freetype2, and it's not the easiest thing to deal with. Pango is also a challenge, but it does everything, including complete formatting of the text.

Post by **wjp** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 9:05 am

SDL_ttf is fairly easy. Basically you just do:

TTF_Init();
TTF_Font* font = TTF_OpenFont(ttffile, pointsize);
SDL_Color black = { 0, 0, 0, 0 };
SDL_Surface* text = TTF_RenderText_Solid(font, "Some text", black);

or

SDL_Surface* text = TTF_RenderUTF8_Solid(font, "Some utf8 text",black);

and then blit the text surface somewhere. For use in exult we'd probably have to add a border to the text manually, but that's easy to do.

Post by **drcode** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 3:46 pm

Heh, that's sure a lot easier than Freetype. I had to read through tons of docs just to figure out how to render a 'glyph' in the right spot.

Sevaton · Post by **Sevaton** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 2:08 am

To Emperor:Actually Quester working on it...He need's help ...
You can find him on : http://www.uo.khakassia.ru/

Sevaton.

Emperor · Post by **Emperor** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 7:32 am

2Sevaton: Thanks

Post by **artaxerxes** » Thu Jan 22, 2004 9:37 am

You can see a screenshot of what the page looks so far at the following:
http://si-french.sourceforge.net/images/snapshot1.png

I still have to code the saving of any changes and the automatic highlight of certain english words for consistency.

Artaxerxes

Parcival · Post by **Parcival** » Thu Jan 22, 2004 10:22 am

Great job your doing, Artaxerxes. The day you finish this tool, ill start translating U7 into dutch : ). Dont know if many people would be interested (an english forum would probably the wrong place to ask), but itd be fun anyway,

Parc

Post by **wjp** » Thu Jan 22, 2004 10:39 am

Artaxerxes: did you get around to testing if the 128-char limit is indeed gone?

Post by **artaxerxes** » Thu Jan 22, 2004 10:52 am

nah.. backlog from work. gotta finish a massive project by the end of the month.

Artaxerxes