10 replies to this topic

[Bagu]

I'm reading a lot of compatibility (Mac, Linux & even Android) and commercial stuff, to get new ZC users...

That's good, but I still think one of the most important things would be selectable languages for the Editor/Player, if you wanna reach more people.

Edited by Bagu, 30 September 2023 - 06:15 AM.

[Timelord]

Yes it would be nice if the interface supported some sort of localisation. I could probably do some German and Russian localization for the UI however I am far too old to court the UI to dozens of languages. This is a job for someone younger.

Pretty sure no one is begging for a Yiddish translation but I could probably do that too.

The only place where I started this, years ago, was in the scripting language, where I added a local directory and started creating a profile for UK dialect as some tokens would be immediately disregarded by the parser such as certain words that differ between UK and American English. I created a very basic local file, but I never completed it.

I should also note that many European characters symbols and e

 

specially stuff like Cyrillic, would be hard to integrate into the system, because of how the Allegro UI works. You need to have a font in the correct character set, and none of these fonts support Beyond basicANSI character sets. If we were to want to create a local for the g u i itself, then we would need to update the Allegro fonts to something that supports modern character sets.

PS I hope that my earlier German to you was completely comprehensible it's been a while.

To accomplish what you want this project would need a variety of native language speakers in a variety of languages to translate all of the UI and menu text and other editor text into those native languages and somehow make the program work with it.

 

Beyond that someone would have to implement all of that as code. This is not an easy undertaking especially with the way that the Zelda Classic UI works.

It was difficult enough just to implement UK versus US English for the original scripting language from 2.50.

All that said I hope that someday this happens.

Edited by Timelord, 02 October 2023 - 05:18 AM.

[Bagu]

 

Yes it would be nice if the interface supported some sort of localisation. I could probably do some German and Russian localization for the UI however I am far too old to court the UI to dozens of languages. This is a job for someone younger.

 

I'm lagging in most languages. My english is good enough to basicly communicate ...but that's it.
...this is sad, since I'm very intressted in languages. 
But I guess, a group of a few, smart people could write translations, for the Player/Editor Interface, without problems.

Implicating the branches, to the programm will be more effort, I guess.


While working on the MotU game, I wanted to use german "Umlaut" characters
(cause the first version will be in german, which is easier to me)
...but I didn't want to do that by Tango.zh.
So I began to make custom versions of the Alpha99's default fonts.
I simply replaced a few symbols, that won't be used in usual screen dialogues, by those Umlauts.
...for example, an "@", becomes an "ä" ...etc
That's the reason why I began to develop a unique modul for the quest.

I made a custom font.dat, it works fine.
But this is still just quest-related stuff. I know that rewriting the ZC/ZQ active interface is a completely different , and much more difficult task.


BTW...
There are still a lot of things, I need to figure and work out, to create a proper MotU-Modul. 

...I just have some problems to set up the basic palette, for the template quest.
And I wanted to edit the intro sequence, after the title screen, but that's seems to be something
that can not be done by ZC moduls and configurations. So I assume the is a scource code thing

...but like anything else I make, it's "learning by doing"
 

Edited by Bagu, 02 October 2023 - 06:13 AM.

[Timelord]

I am too ill to do this but I encourage others to try to do this. I would like to see interpretations of the Zelda Classic player interface in German Russian French the languages, and I would like to see a way for people to create language modules as Locale for this software as with any other.

 

I understand the difficulty in doing this, but if you want to attract users from around the world, this is required.

Ich bin zu krank, um das zu tun, aber ich ermutige andere, es zu versuchen. Ich würde gerne Interpretationen der Zelda Classic-Spieleroberfläche in den Sprachen Deutsch, Russisch, Französisch sehen, und ich würde gerne eine Möglichkeit sehen, wie Benutzer Sprachmodule als Locale für diese Software wie für jede andere erstellen können.

Ich verstehe die Schwierigkeit dabei, aber wenn Sie Benutzer aus der ganzen Welt anziehen möchten, ist dies erforderlich.

 

I am moderately confident to do this in German and Russian and do an extent in Yiddish and Japanese. I am certainly not qualified to do this to any practical and full extent but at least I could help. I think that we need a true local format for the program that allows us to change menu options and other sub menus into the appropriate language for the user contextually, but I don't know if this is realistic given the currency that the software.

 

Ich bin mäßig sicher, dies auf Deutsch und Russisch zu tun und einen Teil auf Jiddisch und Japanisch zu absolvieren. Ich bin sicherlich nicht dazu qualifiziert, dies praktisch und in vollem Umfang zu tun, aber ich könnte zumindest helfen.

 

Ich denke, dass wir ein echtes lokales Format für das Programm benötigen, das es uns ermöglicht, Menüoptionen und andere Untermenüs kontextabhängig in die für den Benutzer geeignete Sprache zu ändern, aber ich weiß nicht, ob dies angesichts der Aktualität der Software realistisch ist.

One of my goals was always to make this software universally readable by all communities and all members of those communities. Right I understand that many of these people are in Europe and in the Middle East and that they need the ability to read the software menus and options in their native language, and I wish to help them with that, however it is not within my power to do that at this time.

Eines meiner Ziele war immer, diese Software für alle Communities und alle Mitglieder dieser Communities allgemein lesbar zu machen. Richtig, ich verstehe, dass viele dieser Menschen in Europa und im Nahen Osten leben und dass sie in der Lage sein müssen, die Menüs und Optionen der Software in ihrer Muttersprache zu lesen, und ich möchte ihnen dabei helfen, aber es liegt nicht in meiner Macht das zu diesem Zeitpunkt zu tun.

One of my reasons is because of my Jewish Russian and German heritage, which has enlighten me into the concept that not everyone understands every language and that we need to have a multilingual program in order to invite people from these diverse cultures into our software. Perhaps someone of my background comprehensive to a better degree than a generic user, however this should still be a concern for the programmers working on it now. If I can be of help in doing this, I will offer my assistance.

 

Einer meiner Gründe ist meine jüdisch-russische und deutsche Herkunft, die mich zu dem Konzept geführt hat, dass nicht jeder jede Sprache versteht und dass wir ein mehrsprachiges Programm benötigen, um Menschen aus diesen verschiedenen Kulturen in unsere Software einzuladen. Vielleicht hat jemand mit meinem Hintergrund einen besseren Überblick als ein normaler Benutzer, aber dies sollte den Programmierern, die jetzt daran arbeiten, immer noch ein Anliegen sein. Wenn ich dabei behilflich sein kann, biete ich meine Hilfe an.

Edited by Timelord, 03 October 2023 - 05:21 AM.

[Bagu]

It's encouraging that you consider this to be possible, at least.

I hope that there's a chance, that some contributors and developers will achieve it, someday.
It would be a giant leap, in history of ZC.

[Timelord]

It's encouraging that you consider this to be possible, at least.

I hope that there's a chance, that some contributors and developers will achieve it, someday.
It would be a giant leap, in history of ZC.

 

Yes I consider it possible, however other people must be involved and it is a very complex process.

 

Ja, ich halte es für möglich, allerdings müssen andere personen beteiligt sein und es ist ein sehr komplexer prozess.

[connor.clark]

I personally have experience with localizing software. It's mostly a question of money to pay professional translators. We also first need to make the English UI and strings good (need a big QA and style pass). The engineering work is not zero but it's not a crazy amount of work.

It's something to consider over the next year of development, but it isn't a huge priority currently. I can use the analytics on the web version to inform what languages would be best to start with (iirc France was the biggest after US).

A separate but equally important problem is one of making quests themselves localizable. I could see a world where we help pay some top quests to be translated (with the owners consent), and build in locale support to the qst strings.

[Bagu]

It's something to consider over the next year of development, but it isn't a huge priority currently. I can use the analytics on the web version to inform what languages would be best to start with (iirc France was the biggest after US).
 

Most european SNES games offered to select between english, french or german
....if I remember correctly, some games had spanish available, too.


EDIT:

And of course, there's no rush.
I'm pretty happy, simply to know that it's actually somwehere on the to do list.

Edited by Bagu, 03 October 2023 - 01:27 PM.

[Timelord]

A separate but equally important problem is one of making quests themselves localizable. I could see a world where we help pay some top quests to be translated (with the owners consent), and build in locale support to the qst strings.

 

My goodness, that is mad ambitious. Some top notch English quests were made by non-English primary creators and are quite befuddling. I don't see this as very feasible in any term, but you do you. Translation of this sort is exceptionally difficult and time consuming versus locale for a UI; and locale for a programming language. 

[ShadowTiger]

I personally have experience with localizing software. It's mostly a question of money to pay professional translators. We also first need to make the English UI and strings good (need a big QA and style pass). The engineering work is not zero but it's not a crazy amount of work.

It's something to consider over the next year of development, but it isn't a huge priority currently. I can use the analytics on the web version to inform what languages would be best to start with (iirc France was the biggest after US).

A separate but equally important problem is one of making quests themselves localizable. I could see a world where we help pay some top quests to be translated (with the owners consent), and build in locale support to the qst strings.

Even if there are other means for translating quests, it'll all likely need to be translated one string at a time, and from inside of ZQuest.  Is there some possibility that strings could be exported to text files, edited in Notepad++, and reimported into ZQuest cleanly?  Is that something for the ol' crystal ball of development's future as a possibility?

 

Because I can see a lot of this being done manually via copying and pasting into Google Translate if needed, at a minimum.  At that point the only challenge is whether text box bounding boxes are respected, but that's something for the quest designer to handle, really.

[klop422]

For the UI, I can offer German and some level of (Mexican) Spanish knowledge. I'd happily do much of that for free tbh, even if it's not as good as a professional would be able to do.