Text and translations

[achilleszero]

Wow, I just read Reagan's civilopedia entry, and it's a total propaganda piece. I mean I expect these thing to put them in a positive light, but it's not even factually correct. Reagan certainly did not preside over the longest period of time without a recession, there was a severe recession caused by the OPEC Oil Embargo, which the US economy didn't recover from until mid 1984... And despite what anyone says, Reagan did not "beat the Russians". I'm not going to go in and throw my own spin on things, and call his presidency out for what my political oppinion is, but it needs to be cleaned up and at least be accurate, and have real facts on the man, not just expound on the glories of conservatism and the evils of liberalism

I guess we now know what party Wolf voted for huh. Thats been my biggest problem with the two newish leaders in LoR; Lech and Reagan. Its so recent that people can remeber them in their lifetime and maybe even voted for or against him. So there by most people are going to hate or worship them. Regardless if he did anything you agreed with but more because of "us against them" attitude that politics has.

But I never said anything, because I was unsure of how many people would jump down my throat for saying anything the least bit dirisive about Reagan. No problem with him being in there but making that entry more down to earth would be great.

 

[phungus420]

But I never said anything, because I was unsure of how many people would jump down my throat for saying anything the least bit dirisive about Reagan. No problem with him being in there but making that entry more down to earth would be great.

This is my take on it. Plus I think he makes a perfect Cha/Cre leader. But that civilopedia entry is like something out of Conservopedia

 

[achilleszero]

This is my take on it. Plus I think he makes a perfect Cha/Cre leader. But that civilopedia entry is like something out of Conservopedia

You know in my quest to match up traits and leaders, I really needed a military trait several times. And reagans Cha looked tempting to snatch. But then as I was reasoning it out, I couldnt think of a better trait for him. Maybe there is a leader out there that deserves it more, but there definately isnt a trait that better describes the Gipper.

 

[phungus420]

Well on a related note, who would you replace Lech Welasa with? We are kind of running out of good leaderheads... I mean there are some that are good looking, but it's not like Musolini is any more deserving of being there then Lech (both should not, is what I mean).
Edit: Following through with this line of thought here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8208003&postcount=23

 

[Merri]

Too bad we don't have leaderheads for Mannerheim and Kekkonen. Eventually I think that if I do get this translation off to somewhere, it'd be good to add the Finns via an optional component to ensure popularity among Finnish players of Civ IV. The leaderheads would be just static images, but other than that I think the quality of this mod could be followed. It'd be nice to see units such as Hakkapeliitta (Hackapelite?) and maybe a Legend unit "The Unknown Soldier" Oh and temples should be replaced with saunas! But oh well, this is just random rambling...

 

[Merri]

phungus420: some useful stuff for you here.

 

[Merri]

Now that I just noticed I need a new string for all units (say name of unit is Yksikkö, I'd need to add a string Yksikkösi for each so I'd end up with Yksikkö:yksikön:yksikköä:Yksikkösi). This arises a problem: the units are all over the place! I made a search for TXT_KEY_UNIT_ and ended up having a list of 21 files!

Would it make sense to somehow reorganize the files so that it would be possible to find everything of one thing in just one file? I read from the Modiki that it doesn't really matter what the name of a file is, so there could be files like LoR_Units.xml, LoR_Leaders.xml, LoR_Civs.xml, LoR_Hints.xml... some of the current files are rather unnecessary, there are some almost empty files, and (as you know) there are unrequired duplicates.

And I know, this would be a massive work to do as we have over 12 000 strings. In the other hand doing it would decrease the amount of work when adding/changing/removing stuff.

 

[phungus420]

Organizing the Text is something I've always wanted to do. But there is other stuff to work on, and I'm not motivated enough to do it . Feel free if you want, would certainly be nice.

 

[Merri]

Yay, my own little playground of insanity!

Edit!
I've now done some work on this, the current files I've ended up with are:

LoR_Components.xml (AIAutoPlay, Autolog, BarbarianCiv, BUG, Colors, etc.)
LoR_Interface.xml (BUG options)
LoR_Hints.xml (BUG hints)
LoR_Leaders.xml (Hiawatha...)
LoR_Leaders_Civilopedia.xml (Hiawatha...)

I try to keep everything of one thing in one file for the exception of Civilopedia entries, because they're so long and are thus harder to handle being like that.

 

[Merri]

I've now gone through almost all the files that do not exist in the original game & official expansions and have ended up with 11 files:

LoR_Buildings
LoR_Buildings_Civilopedia
LoR_Civs
LoR_Civs_Civilopedia
LoR_Components
LoR_Hints
LoR_Leaders
LoR_Leaders_Civilopedia
LoR_Menus
LoR_Units
LoR_Units_Civilopedia

Out of these, Components tries to have strings that you can see while playing the game, and Menus contains text you see in windows, popups and menus. However it also has Civilopedia entries thanks to the BUG mod and currently totals nearly 7 MB. It is quite a massive beast, don't know whether I should dedicate two new files just for BUG (LoR_BUG & LoR_BUG_Civilopedia).

As for the remaining files, I've thought to make a clear separation between original game files and the stuff LoR has added in. This means there will still be all the original Civ4, Warlords and BtS files, but they contain original strings only except for the added languages, at this point this means Finnish. This should make it much easier to add new languages, and to translate the untranslated portions of the existing official game languages (French, German, Italian & Spanish). I haven't taken a look around to see what other languages are out there which would also be usable in LoR (I assume LoR/Civ4 is by default limited to ISO-8859-1 compatible languages only?) - but adding them in wouldn't be hard at all, at least as far as the original game files are accounted for.


Oh well, back to working on the files... and hope all this stuff works after I'm done with them.

 

[phungus420]

Keep in mind whenever RevDCM updates I need to remerge, so all the text coming from BUG, Revolutions, or other core components should just be left alone.

 

[Merri]

I'm starting to think it may be a very good idea to make an automated tool for texts to do the merging and some other common tasks. At least I assume standard merging becomes increasingly hard when you add in more languages that are not within the core components by default.

 

[phungus420]

Oh, good point. We need to get glider to implement Finish, since you've already translated it for him, and have the Rev and Bug files with the tags. You should upload those Text Files in the Revolution Forum. Since you've already done the work, I'm sure glider will include it in RevDCM by default in future updates.

 

[Merri]

Now that I remember: there is stuff that makes my life very hard when translating. For example, by default there are strings such as <English>%s of %s</English> that would give Kingdom of France for example, but in Finnish I'd need it to be swapped around, Ranskan kuningaskunta (Ranska is the name of the country). How can I go ahead and swap the strings around? What is worse, in other places the strings really are the other way around. I tried to skip the issue by using Kuninkaallinen Ranska (a direct translation would be something like "France which has a King"), but in some places the strings are actually used the other way around, and I end up with Ranska Kuninkaallinen (which would be a very bad first and last name for someone, you know, a lot of Finnish surnames end with -nen).

In Revolution however, there rarely are any %s's. Instead there are just strings that start with something, something is put between and then some other string is applied afterwards. This makes my life even harder, because it prevents me from using alternative forms of words. Say I had countrynames like Suomi:Suomen:Suomelle (having a meaning of Finland:Finland's/of Finland:to Finland) and suomalainen:suomalaisen:suomalaisille (Finn:[of ]Finn's:to Finns). Finnish doesn't have "to", "for", "of", and so on, all those are instead used in the end of a word and the form may change depending on how a word ends.


So... if I go to say something to glider1, he probably won't be very happy with all the changes he needs to do in order to keep non-English people happy. At the moment if I go translating the current RevDCM strings I end up with pretty bad sounding language, I need to add extra words just to be able to use a basic form of a word making strings far longer than they'd need to be etc.

 

[Alsark]

So I've been really sick and haven't really been able to do much. I still am, but I'm on the road to recovery. Did we need Civilopedia entries for the three new leaders (El Cid, Xerxes, and Abu Bakr), or are there entries already written for these three?

 

[achilleszero]

So I've been really sick and haven't really been able to do much. I still am, but I'm on the road to recovery. Did we need Civilopedia entries for the three new leaders (El Cid, Xerxes, and Abu Bakr), or are there entries already written for these three?

Well glad your doing better atleast. I would say we do need entries for them, I would say we need pedia entires for them. Im not sure if phungus did them, as hes been busy lately.

 

[Merri]

As a note, I'm currently working on a tool that should solve the text merging issues when there are new versions of component mods available, I'll try to fine tune it enough to make it usable for everyone. This eats my translation progress of course, but I really want to solve this issue before the next major versions of component mods become available and when I start need to work on merging new leaders, units and stuff to my own work in progress and vice versa.

There are also a few things I need to try out, such as only having Finnish on some files to see whether it is possible to just have the Finnish translation for Civ/Warlords/BtS without including the game's existing strings. Don't know yet in depth how everything works...

Last, I'm working on REALbasic as I bought it last January, I haven't used it a lot but I really need to start abandoning VB6, have used that thing far too long already...

 

[Alsark]

Well glad your doing better atleast. I would say we do need entries for them, I would say we need pedia entires for them. Im not sure if phungus did them, as hes been busy lately.

Seems I spoke too soon - those were the pills talking.

And yeah. I was wondering 'cause like I know some leaders already have entries made either from people in the thread of the leaderhead or made by the artist itself.

 

[achilleszero]

Seems I spoke too soon - those were the pills talking.

And yeah. I was wondering 'cause like I know some leaders already have entries made either from people in the thread of the leaderhead or made by the artist itself.

I dont think that any of 3 of these leaders had anything like that in their threads.

But dont rush yourself, rest/heal up then work can come later. Plus from what phungus is saying it will still be several days before new edition comes out, so there is plenty of time.

 

[Alsark]

Haha.... the resting up idea was all well and good except... I immediately got sick with something else after recovering from what I had :/. This one isn't nearly as bad, though.

Unfortunately I'll be going to Florida um... later on today, actually. I won't have internet access until next Sunday. I can write up descriptions on those three leaders at some point during my vacation, though. Particularly during the long drive. I'm assuming we do need descriptions for them? Again, though, the problem is I wouldn't be able to have them in until Sunday.