Keyring & SI-Fixes Mod - Multilingual Setup

[SirJohn]

Hi all,

I hope this reaches any of the people who have worked on the Keyring and or Serpent Isle Fixes mod. Marzo, KC and whoever I might have missed out now (Sorry!)

Would it (WITHOUT much hassle) be possible to modify the sources of the aforementioned mods to make use of translations provided by the community?

From my understanding, this would require to have some "strings" - file and a tiny sniplet of code in each .uc file to read from the defined strings file, but I might be overlooking some deeper impacts here.

As I lack the knowledge to modify the sources myself, I would rely on you guys on this matter.

But IF it is feasible, I'd love to see these mods in German and gladly offer to translate both of them.

All the best,

John

[Knight Captain]

It is possible but it would be a non-trivial amount of work.
Rather than matching the strings, it would make sense to fork the code and input the translations directly. This would only work with Exult and not the original DOS-based engine though.

How is Ultima VII Part Two auf Deutsch coming along?

I should mention I converted all of the friendly Silver Seed NPCs to their own functions and gave them schedules in my unreleased mod. That may help with your project as well.

[SirJohn]

Hi KC,

thanks for taking interest in the German translation of SI. It's coming along rather smoothly atm, if I may say so myself With approx. 70% of the inital translation work done by now, I do hope to start alpha testing and polishing stuf already some time later in 2020.

I have never forked anything on either platform and have no knowledge whatsoever on how it works, but am I right to assume, I would need to redo the translations each time a uc-file in question is updated as this would overwrite "my" files? If so, it sounds like a rather tedious endeavour I'd like to avoid

As for the news about your mod: sorry, you lost me (aka I don't get the meaning of what you wrote) - but if there is something I can make use of or adapt for the dosbox/vanilla version of the game, please do elaborate. If there is something to translate: count me in. If it is some exult-only stuff: I am positive I will get to the point to make my translation working under Exult just like the BG version

John

[Dominus]

My thoughts:
- mods: you could probably do it as strings to be translated but as it is usecode and so mixed with the code commands, this sounds like a big undertaking for not much gain as you will have to compile it as a usecode file anyway.
So my suggestion for this would be make a copy of https://github.com/exult/exult/tree/mas ... ifixes/src and https://github.com/exult/exult/tree/mas ... eyring/src, translate it (mostly everytime the code is written say "...", give it back to me and we will add it as a separate language code. That is mostly easy and since both mods are rather mature, not much is needed to keep the usecode syncronized.
In the mod the usecode file would be called usecode_de.

- some code would be nice to detect the language of the main game and then use the appropriate usecode file. It's already needed for the text messages we provide with Exult these days.

- BUT multilingual setup for Exult would be really cool. Extract the few English strings that are hardcoded in Exult and make it possible to translate these and then chose your Exult language (and/or let Exult use the appropriate from the system settings)

[Fig28awsome44]

Multilingual exult would be really awesome, as right now it seems to be a pain to get ahold of the game in a language other than english.