Translation of Custom Maps

As you might not be aware, the coding for AW runs on 2 character sets.

What this means is that when making whole maps, the system uses ISO 8859-1 and saves there and so it only covers:
Afrikaans Albanian Danish English (UK and US) German Icelandic Malay Irish (new orthography) Italian Latin (basic classical orthography)
Luxembourgish (basic classical orthography) Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) Portuguese Scottish Gaelic Spanish Swahili Swedish

But making scenarios or presets, the system saves to UTF-8 which allow pretty much all writing systems to work.

(Note1: Collaborators for preset/scenarios do not exist)

Therefore, to efficiently collaborate and translate, I suggest this method for cartographer A and translator B with map M and preset P:
A has to enable scenario/preset making for M so that B could create P with added translation.
B should save P with a reasonable name and then credit him/herself in the P description for the translation effort.
When playing M, P can be selected as a translated version in the drop-down bar underneath cover image of M.

Translators (English into Other languages)
French-ThomasMer
Spanish-raetahcodeupon
Portuguese
German
Italian
Turkish-Roncho
Russian
Chinese-ezzatam
Greek-Aristosseur

Sign up if you want to help out!

Greek-me
if yoba says he can too don't trust him he is terrible

Just converting from ISO 8859-1 (which is more commonly known as ASCII) to UTF-8 is dead simple, as UTF-8 is backwards compatible. Also, it's just as good for performance. Every character in the Basic Multilingual Plane (all ASCII characters, for one, which covers most languages!) takes up one byte, much like in ASCII.

Actually making every map translatable would require an enormous effort though. For one, every string has to be parsed. Okay, I guess it's XML (with Microsoft's proprietary extensions), that is easy and there are libraries for every language to do that. But just think how they have to build a whole infrastructure that dynamically generates these files and loads them hopefully on demand per map (and per user, depending on their language) so they can avoid huge load times for players... it would be very hard to implement, and frankly, I don't see the point. The game is still light on story and intentionally so - that's why it's fun (just like roguelikes).

As for the interface though, I think they could probably pull it off. But every single map? That would probably require a rewrite of the file architecture for the maps and the creation of a converter utility that works flawlessly for older maps, or expect butthurt from map designers.

I think the AW Dev Team (or ProtoBytes or whatever it's called) really shot themselves in the foot by not translating the interface elements. Crowdsourcing translation really does work by the way. Services like Transifex work marvelously well for billion-dollar corporations like RedHat and massive foundations like Apache. No need to spend all that money on translators - as 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow' (Linus' Law; means that the more people doing Quality Assurance, the less likely the chance you will end up with a crap product).

PS: I really wonder how you found that out, ezzatam. Where is the cache for AW maps kept?

Just wanted to clarify a few things here:
1. AW fully supports unicode, and in atWar you will be able to use it for the maps as well as scenarios (which worked already). Although, I think it is still better to create the original map in english and then use a scenario preset to translate it to other languages.
2. Presets DO NOT have to come from same cartographer for them to be selectable in game. It is only a case with default map, with any other maps it shows top 10 played presets regardless of the scenario creator.

Kirjoittanut YOBA, 30.11.2012 at 14:46

Actually making every map translatable would require an enormous effort though. ...build a whole infrastructure that dynamically generates these files and loads them hopefully on demand per map (and per user, depending on their language) so they can avoid huge load times for players... it would be very hard to implement, and frankly, I don't see the point. The game is still light on story and intentionally so - that's why it's fun (just like roguelikes).

You seem to thinking too hard about the translation.
1) I am not asking for a map where Arabic players see Arabic and Chinese players see Chinese simultaneously, but rather versions of the whole map fixed to one (non-English) language. This then removes necessity of using English as communication method and attracts players of other non-English countries.
2) Load times are fine, as I have tested with my custom maps with fully translated map and units+description.

Kirjoittanut YOBA, 30.11.2012 at 14:46

As for the interface though, I think they could probably pull it off. But every single map? That would probably require a rewrite of the file architecture for the maps and the creation of a converter utility that works flawlessly for older maps, or expect butthurt from map designers.

3) Ivan and Amok are already trying to translate the interface already (with German, since that's Dave's nationality). We, map-makers can do our part.

Kirjoittanut YOBA, 30.11.2012 at 14:46

PS: I really wonder how you found that out, ezzatam. Where is the cache for AW maps kept?

From using HTTP Request
Host: atwar-game.com[CRLF]
.........................................................................
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,UTF-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7[CRLF]
Cache-Control: no-cache

I also tried to directly clone map and change the country names into Chinese which failed, then retried with a scenario/preset which worked
NB: I asked Amok afterwards and he confirmed of different location saves...

I started to make a translation of spanish of the default map.

Kirjoittanut Amok, 30.11.2012 at 15:50

Just wanted to clarify a few things here:
2. Presets DO NOT have to come from same cartographer for them to be selectable in game. It is only a case with default map, with any other maps it shows top 10 played presets regardless of the scenario creator.

Which makes this initiative all the more easier-any chance of designating translators?
Btw, that's not really a clarification. It is the first time of the admins stating it.

Kirjoittanut raetahcodeupon, 30.11.2012 at 15:53

I started to make a translation of spanish of the default map.

Spanish is a very widely-used language and similar to English already, so you should only be making a few alterations comparatively.
Thanks very much!

Kirjoittanut ezzatam, 30.11.2012 at 15:58

Kirjoittanut raetahcodeupon, 30.11.2012 at 15:53

I started to make a translation of spanish of the default map.

Spanish is a very widely-used language and similar to English already, so you should only be making a few alterations comparatively.
Thanks very much!

Yes, english and spanish are really similar, and in fact some cities, speacially the name of USA cities have not translation to Spanish, for example Houston.
Some of them have easy translations: New York-Nueva York, New Orleans-Nueva Orleans.
Some citties of USA have spanish name, Las Vegas, San Francisco.
USA in spanish = EEUU (Estados Unidos).
The hard part is that i have to add Accents (´) to many places like Cánada, Dénver, México...
(I started the translation in the North America).

Signing up for french,

Ah, right, I was thinking more of Wesnoth's (an excellent high fantasy TBS game) scheme! In that game, the maps, strings and scripts (for events, addition of weapons and so on, it's extremely versatile) are stored in separate files. They have built it so you can actually go and translate individual unit and town names, in addition to story elements like dialogue*.

Every map (or campaign, or scenario, or 'era', or faction or...) downloaded from the add-on menu hence downloads the translated strings (if available) for the current user interface language, as well as the en_US strings, which are the default. This helps them save on bandwidth and expose an easy-to-use translation interface to translators that can be used to translate absolutely everything in the game (except the debug console output, and intentionally so). It works marvellously well. It is exactly what would be a waste of time for ProtoBytes to implement, as AW is not a story-centric game.

The ability to translate the user interface would certainly help out the Turkish and other language communities though, which are a very large customer base of AW - ultimately leading to more profit. I must say, AW has one of the best F2P models I've ever seen - it's fair to non-paying players, and yet it is definitely worth paying from. Excellent choices all around from both a game design and business perspective.

* Which, by the way, would not work in AW, as it is outside the scope of the game. People need to stop bitching about that. AW is a fast-paced game designed from the ground up for multiplayer, unlike something like Wesnoth which was not designed initially with MP in mind. Also, since AW is not tile-based, it would a pain in the ass to script events for. Full disclosure: I've partially written a Wesnoth add-on myself.

I can help turkish. I'll ask tesla and bargain too.

Kirjoittanut Roncho, 01.12.2012 at 12:08

I can help turkish. I'll ask tesla and bargain too.

Thanks Roncho, I think we need to attract more players worldwide. If you can translate the world map into turkish bit by bit then it would be great!