I haven’t forgotten about my project, but I’ve been a bit bogged down with other distractions (e.g. a flooded basement). I’ve done a bit of reading and research during this time, and I think I’ve got a basic grasp on the specifics of how to go about doing the things I still need to do. I’ll try to get a complete working version together (still sans art) when things calm down.
I’ve also been taking an interest in fan translations of various console and PC games and the process involved, both on the translating end and the hacking end. It often seems like there are more translators available then hackers, which slows down the process. It occurs to me that if I ever get to the point where I can make some type of game, even something fairly simple, that I’d like to handle the text in such a way that the production of a translated version can be handled by the translator alone without the need for a hacker.
To this end, I’m starting to formulate an idea for some kind of practice project. Nothing fancy, but just something along the lines of a simple program that displays text and messages drawn from a set of subfolders containing plain text files, with an option to easily change the active path and thereby switch between which text file the program is using. You’d be able to produce various translations of the original text file and then dump them into their own subfolder under the ”languages” folder, and have the new language setting automatically appear as an option in the menu.
I suppose one of the first steps would be to figure out how to organize the folders and how to break up the text. Separate files for different components of the program? English>menus.txt, English>dialogue.txt, English>items.txt, etc., and you simply recreate this structure for any language you want to add, and the program does the rest.
Kind of useless on its own, but definitely a nice feature to add to larger programs. I would imagine that there are plenty of examples of “language settings” like this already in use. I guess how this is a little bit different is that it’s really more about “potential language settings” and their easy future implementation. It’s just too bad they didn’t do it this way for all those old games… or for current games, for that matter. The original language text is cleanly and clearly organized for the sake of the translator; change one folder in a target path, and bam, that’s all the “hacking” you need to do.