Does removing languages break files?

[Sullied]

Hey fellas;

Long time lurker, first time poster. I'm working through some basic modding and I've run into a bit of a problem; the tutorial I've been watching (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=262402) is telling me I can't remove the French, German, Spanish (etc) tags or it will "cause problems"

I've already removed a few languages out of some of my files just to ensure they are easier to read through. I've run into no problems, will it only break the game for users playing non-English versions of the game?

 

[keldath]

wont cause problems.
i copied all test files to excel , the deleted all the langs but english.

 

[Sullied]

wont cause problems.
i copied all test files to excel , the deleted all the langs but english.

Alright, well I haven't had any issues with it thus far, I'm assuming if it causes any problems it will just be for those using alternative languages.

 

[keldath]

yup , stick to english and it will be fine.

by the way how do you plan to remove the other language tags?

 

[Sullied]

yup , stick to english and it will be fine.

by the way how do you plan to remove the other language tags?

How do you mean? You just delete them out of the file they're in so you don't have 5 versions of the same info clogging up the screen.

 

[Nightinggale]

There is a potential hazard to removing languages. Each language is handled like a number internally and when reading the text XML files, it will skip a number of languages according to the language you have picked. English is 0 meaning it will always be the first. If somebody sets the game to French, it will skip the first and read the next. If you have deleted everything but English, then it will presumably crash.

Caveman2Cosmos has code to use English if the language in question is missing and order doesn't matter. I like the idea, but not that it relies on a 3rd party library and recoded the concept in Medieval Conquest where it will not need extra libraries. You should likely add the code from one of those mods if you want to safely remove languages.

While on the topic of making the text files look nice, as of today I managed to make the game read UTF-8 directly meaning character escapes will no longer be needed. If you want to write ö, you write ö, not & #246;
As this is brand new, it is very poorly tested, but it looks ok so far.

Feel free to use my code if you like. Just tell me if you do and credit me for the code
(this goes for everybody, not just Sullied)

 

[isenchine]

Actually, if the game is set to another language than English it will not crash but the interface will be screwed which comes to the same effect: the game is unplayable.

In spite of appropriate translations, the only acceptable solution is to have all five language tags contain the same text in English.

@ Nightinggale: it looks like you have modded very nice features (like the one you describe, but not only). But for the majority of us, digging in 200 files and 500,000 lines of coding is a bit indigest. Any chance you could issue standalones mods one day?...

 

[Nightinggale]

@ Nightinggale: it looks like you have modded very nice features (like the one you describe, but not only). But for the majority of us, digging in 200 files and 500,000 lines of coding is a bit indigest. Any chance you could issue standalones mods one day?...

That's possible. I could release a standalone modcomp with the text XML changes. They are put into each other and kind of hard to split. This mean it will also contain the addition that you can add/remove languages in XML. No need to compile a new DLL just because you want to translate to a new language.

I will postpone making such a modcomp until it has matured a bit. It would likely be best to give it full UTF-8 support (right now 3 and 4 byte characters aren't supported). I guess comments could also be improved. The part on how to map specific characters to specific GameFont IDs will likely have to be modified for each specific GameFont file and needs to be fairly simple to edit. I added support for Russian and all it needs for that is the ID of the first character.

I also had a request for a standalone debug display where you can get the ID of everything in GameFont. I'm still wondering what to do about that