translation

[palaga]

Hi

I am trying to translate Serpent Isle in French. I think you guys know exactly how the speech (and other texts) data is working. Did you write any documentation on that topic ?
If so, could mail it to me ?

Thanks anyway for the great job you did.

[Klown Killer]

Salut.

moi aussi g laissé le même message que toi et il devrait etre possible d'éditer les textes avec Exult Studio ( ou du moins dans pas longtemps)

Si tu veux toujours traduire Serpent Isle , mail moi . Moi aussi je veux le traduire et g trouvé d'autres personnes qui sont interessés. (plus on est de fous...)

Néanmoins , si tu connais le codage ou la prog, ça serait pas un mal...

bye.

[wjp]

Please keep things in english here for those that don't speak french.

[Klown Killer]

sorry but the message is uniquely for palaga.
Does not have any sense for others.....

[artaxerxes]

Hey guys,

Ca me tente aussi de vous aider. J'ai l'avantage de connaitre un peu de prog (j'ai propose qques patches pour Exult deja).

Ou en etes vous dans la traduction?

Artaxerxes

********************
In English now for Willem!

Hey guys,

I'm tempted to help you too. I do now some programming (I submited a few patches for Exult already).

How advanced are you in the translation?

Artaxerxes

[Klown Killer]

ha! ben c simple , on a rien traduit vu que pour ma part , je connait pas grand chose du tout en codage et autres, par contre si tu sais comment faire , let's go !!!

**********************

ha! well , it's simple , we have translate nothing because i don't understand programming but if you know how to handle it , let's go (in english into text) !!!

[Blackbird]

Ah, Exult en francais s'il vous plait! Vive le source libre...

It will be nice to play Exult totally in French for the sheer novelty. I'm from Quebec myself so being able to play SI in my mother tongue will be nifty.

J'espere que la traduction va etre un fait accompli. L'expression des mes meilleurs sentiments, mes amis francophones. Alors, la traduction sera francais d'europe (pur) ou quebecois?

- bb

[nadir]

In order to achieve a full tranlsation of BG or SI you need to do the following:

unpack "text.flx" with expack, translate all the strings within and pack it again
disassemble the "usecode" file, translate the strings and reassemble it.

[artaxerxes]

On va parler en Vieux Francois comme dans BG.

(Ce qui fait que le ca va ressembler a du Quebecois! LOL)

Artaxerxes

****************************

Translation in pure olde French please like in BG!

(that would make it look like Quebecois thus! LOL)

Artaxerxes

[artaxerxes]

*** DELETED ***

[artaxerxes]

*** Deleted ***

[wjp]

Trying to break your previous record of longest post?

[nadir]

Sorry Artaxerxes, I deleted your posts.
We all have "text.flx" thank you very much, so there is no need to post it here.

[artaxerxes]

Willem:
I was close...


Nadir:
Although true, not everyone know how to extract those texts. As you've read in the previous posts, those guys aren't programmers... But, maybe I should email them directly... Sorry for the inconvenience.

Artaxerxes

[artaxerxes]

Blackbird,

I've tried to email you but it seems the email address is wrong.

Could you contact me please at my artaxerxes2@iname.NOSPAM.com email address?

Artaxerxes

[nadir]

Artaxerxes, I've provided information about this on the mailing list, which is the right place to discuss about things like these (developer-oriented)

[artaxerxes]

how do I access the mailing list, again?

** checks the FAQ, the DOC **

Yup, there is nothing about the mailing list..

Artaxerxes

[wjp]

Actually, the e-mail address is at the bottom of every page on exult.info.

[artaxerxes]

I have a question regarding translation.

The french language uses several letters not found in the english language such as éâàëèî etc

When I made a first translation of words using those letters, I didn't realize the "alphabet" used by Exult is in fact a series of letters associated to an image.

Should I make a series of images for those accentuated letters or is there a way around? Is it the only problem I'll face? Should I modify the source to also understand those characters?

For instance, I enticipate the algo is something like:

void exult_print(*string, alphabet){
while(string ""){
letter = head(string);
string = body(string);
position = ChrToInt(letter);
display_letter(position,alphabet);
}
}


It happens to be that the character é is \0351 = 233 = 0xE9.
How would the rendering engine know what 0xE9 is since the rest of the alphabet is between 0x41 (A) and 0x7A (z)?

Any help for that?

I also have a screenshot of what the text looks like with the french name but the wrong alphabet set. The word is "lumière" and is obtained by clicking on 'light' in the cavern.
Ask me for it and I'll send it by email.

thanks,

Artaxerxes

[wjp]

Ultima 7 maps characters directly to frame numbers. A capital A (0x41) has frame number 0x41, lowercase a (0x61) has frame number 0x61, etc...

So, you'd have to check the font shapes to see if they contain accented characters, and if they do, make sure you're using the correct ones in the new text.flx (possibly by a small postprocessing program if they're different that the ones in your favourite editor)

[artaxerxes]

that's what I thought....

Unfortunately, there is no accentuated shapes in the alphabet shapes.... we'll have to make our own....

Wouldn't it be easier to simply modify the algo to say:

if character to put is higher than 0x7A
then if it is 0xE8 then put é
else if it is 0x59 then put è
etc

Or would that be to french specific?

Artaxerxes

[wjp]

Well, you could make a new french font shape containing frames from 0x80 to 0xFF. It wouldn't be too hard to have Exult look in that new file for high characters.

[suraimu]

There aren't any accented shapes in the font? What did they do in
the german version then?

[wjp]

They probably used a font shape that did have accented shapes in it

[artaxerxes]

Suraimu:

Would you be kind enough to send me a couple files that are german specific?

I would need fonts.vga (/static/fonts.vga) and also text.flx (/static/text.flx)?

I need those to complete the french translation so that I could see how exult handles the characters over 0x7a and also how the fonts.vga are different in german. That would help me a lot!

Thanks

Artaxerxes
Artaxerxes2@iname.com

[Blackbird]

Artaxerxes:

Is there anything specific you need to talk to me about? Anything you wanted to tell me can be said in front of the Exult Team...
If you wanted to talk tech, I don't think I can be of much help. I'd love to assist on the translation, but I'm kept very busy with my studies and pregnant fiancee.
I try to set aside a little bit of time to play U7 every day, but it's hard.
BTW, never played U7BG in French. When it came out in Quebec, my parents got me the English version on 5.25 diskettes!!

- bb

[suraimu]

If I had the german version I wouldn't have asked what they did in the
german version, now would've I?

[artaxerxes]

AMAZING

I've managed to put a hand on the fonts.vga file for the french version of BG.

Here are my "discoveries":

1- It contains not only french letters (éàëê etc) but also the spanish letters (n with a tilde) and the german letters (lots of umlaut-ed voyels and the SS replacement... you know the beta that is called s-tset I think?).

2- Those characters are IN THE BEGINNING of the shapes: frames 1 to 31 included.

3- I've got a gut feeling the coding team made if then else loop I mentioned earlier in this post to choose the letters not between A and z.
Otherwise they would have to code the language specific letters with control sequences (0x00 - 0x20).

A study of texts.flx from the french version will reveal which of the 2 is right...


Be right back

Artaxerxes

[artaxerxes]

Alright:

For your information, all you translators:

It is useless to translate using regular accentuated letters. The accentuated letters are differently coded in Ultima files.

For instance, instead of coding

0x66 0x6c 0xe8 0x63 0x68 0x65 0x00

for the word "flèche" (arrow) finished with an empty character (\0), the files is coded this way:

0x66 0x6c 0x0c 0x63 0x68 0x65 0x00

that is 0x0c replaces 0xe8. Incidentally, the fonts.vga contains the proper letter (è) at frame 0x0c (12). Consequently, I assume the parsing engine is simply associating hex code for a string to a shift in the frame for an appropriate shape number, EVEN for accentuated letters.

Artaxerxes

[drcode]

That's a good thing. Those frames (associated with control characters) are empty in the English version.

[Klown Killer]

i'm beginning the translation of SI in french.. with the help of artaxerxe..Great !
(just translation, i'm not programmer...=)

[Thomas_Decker]

Is anybody out there translating SI to german?

[Dominus]

ah, the rule of OpenSource, first one to ask is volunteering to do it.
Go for it Thomas!!!!

So far no one has raised his voice to do it