Hey everyone,
I know we have a good number of German players here in the forums, and if you are one of them I need your help if you can spare a bit of time. AI War is going to be coming to retail in Germany in a few months, and we have the translation back from the publisher. I can't speak to its general quality as I don't know more than perhaps 30 words of German (last time I was in Germany, I was 12), but what is immediately apparent to me with this is the fact that there are sizing issues all over the place.
- The ship descriptions are all on one line, which causes the ship tooltips to be completely unreadable for a good number of ships. I need someone (or several someones) who know German to add sensible line breaks into these so that they will show properly on a screen that is 1024x768. The original ships.xml file had line breaks to keep all of the lines to within various general widths, and you can use those as a guide. I suspect that similar issues about in the tutorials.
- There are also numerous other too-lengthy bits of text scattered all throughout various aspects of the game. Where possible, I would like to find suitably clear abbreviations to fit within the existing spaces. Where not possible, I'll need to make it so that the game itself uses a bit of larger sizing for certain buttons, etc.
- In general, I'd love it if someone who knows the game can do a "sanity check" to make sure that the names of ships and stuff in the game is what players would expect. If not, feel free to rename them something more appropriate.
- In general, I am looking for opinions and help from German-speaking AI War players to make sure that this localization is of a quality they would be comfortable with picking up at a store. There may be some gotchas in the current work that I haven't even thought of.
This is for version 3.016 of the game, not with the expansion, so the best way to test this is to turn off the expansion. Otherwise, the expansion parts will just be in English while the non-expansion parts are in German. To load up the German localization, simply download the attached file and then look in the Language folder in your AI War folder. Then create a folder called "trans" inside Language, and unpack the German files into there. When you load up the game, it will be in German, with it defaulting to English for any missing German items (thus German players can always use the English-language patches without incident, but any new text that has not yet been translated for them would be in English until a German-language text update was later created).
AI War is also coming to retail in Russia, but so far our Russian publisher is handling all of these sort of things internally. In the case of our German publisher, they are wanting to go to manufacturing on this Wednesday the 27th, which is putting a ton of time pressure on me for making sure that the quality of this stuff comes out appropriately, etc. So any help that you can provide before the 27th is
much appreciated, and I will make a special section for people who assist with this in particular if you can give me the text for "German Localization QA" or something like that.
Thanks again for all your help, everyone!
