Western Language Support in 2024?

[Geep]

On 6/8/2024 at 6:34 PM, MirceaKitsune said:

readables only allowed english characters, everything else will appear as a rectangle

For a new FM, if you limit yourself to readables that use Stone, Carleton, Carleton_condensed, or (more limited) Treasure_map, then your translation can include and show European characters. However, that won't help your dream...

On 6/8/2024 at 6:34 PM, MirceaKitsune said:

My dream with creating a multi city hub FM was to allow the player to travel to different countries by ship. Part of the plan was having a few readables written in relevant languages, granted I can use Google Translate to obtain a few sentences in an Asian or Arabic or other language.

The translation system is to show the language the user-selects, not what the mapper wants at particular locations. Probably you'd have to burn text into images instead, like an in-game map. And then you can have Asian, Arabic, and the artist formerly known (and I guess known again) as Prince.

[Geep]

A Proposal to Drop the 12pt Size of Fonts (in DATs & DDS’s) from TDM 2.13 Distribution

I’d like to suggest distributing only 24pt and 48pt sizes going forward. Reasons are as follows:

12pt is little used. It appears that none of the readable or sign prefabs come with a .gui with a textscale value (i.e., under 0.15) that would invoke 12pt glyphs.

Engine wouldn’t care if it’s dropped. If an FM-specific .gui used a textscale that would ordinarily invoke a font’s 12pt glyphs, but those files are not present, it would automatically switch over to 24pt instead. This is a well-worn functionality.

12pt coverage of codepoints is unimpressive. Generally, ASCII-only at best.

Provided 12pt glyphs are often worse-looking than scaled-down 24pt glyphs, particularly on modern screens. The traditional case for 12pt was that, when generated from TTF, it could take advantage of small-scale “hinting” to make better tiny bitmaps. Maybe some fonts do that successfully; I just looked at 12pt Camberic in detail, and there are a number of glyphs that are crap. Nowadays, with higher-rez screens than Doom days, passing it through the 12pt bitmap before scaling to the screen seems like a quality bottleneck.

It’s not worth the effort to make 12pt fonts better. This is the most important point. Tweaking glyphs and expanding codepoint coverage (e.g., for missing or European characters) is slow work. That effort with DATs & DDS’s is better spent on 24 & 48pt.

[Geep]

Release of gen_lang_plus v 1.0

My new C++ version of gen_lang.pl, called gen_lang_plus, is now available. For a comparison and complete description, as well as downloads, see the new wiki page Gen_Lang Programs. There are some modest improvements and bug fixes compared to gen_lang.pl, which it is hopefully positioned to supersede.

In the larger picture, having this code as C++ may facilitate partial re-use, e.g., perhaps as future capabilities within TDM or DR.

Thanks, @Amadeus, for providing me with output file samples to compare against.

[Geep]

@nbohr1more, I looked at your new Translation Packs column in https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod, chose Stumpy's "Dead Drunk" marked as having a translation pack, downloaded it (running 2.13 beta5), and no signs of translation pack.

Is this because 2.13 isn't officially released? If so, how do people (namely me) get the new translation packs right now?

When the official release occurs, I assume the download will include the translation pack if available. Will the Mission Archive web page once again have the "#" marked for translated versions?

I remember there was a wiki page somewhere that said, for a given FM, what particular languages were actually translated. Is that now up to date too?

BTW, from what you posted a while ago, there are some translation packs that are the traditional style and some with the DarkFate style. I'm interested in understanding the latter.

[nbohr1more]

Hmm... My deaddrunk folder has "deaddrunk_l10n.pk4", maybe something is going on with the mirrors?

Normal style:

Mission author runs their mission through the translation perl script and re-packs their mission in translated form along with a translation pack that only contains the strings folder. ( See Grayman missions for examples )

Darkfate \ Russian style:

Mission author runs their mission through the translation perl script the makes a translation pack containing the altered map file, GUI files and Objectives. The original is left alone, the translation pack contains all the changes and overrides parts of the original mission on load. ( See Sotha missions for examples )

[nbohr1more]

I deleted the /darkmod/fms/deaddrunk folder and gathered the mission from the in-game downloader.

I next restarted TDM and went to the downloader to get the translation pack.

I installed dead drunk and set the language to Russian

The briefing and objectives now render in Russian.

The language pack for this mission includes Russian and English.

As I can tell, all is in working order?