Spring RTS Engine

We are TAspring fans from China,and we appreciate for the TAspring project and clan-sy.
We believe that many many people love this game all over the world,why not make TAspring more friendly to the fans? we mean that TAspring must be a International version with all language supported all in one,and we can communicate in battleroom and the game in my nation language.
Thanks!

because it would be v difficult to code, probably inaccurate and i'd rather see a better game than a game with more language support...

Actually I was thinking about how many chinese people there are and how big the community would get...
It's a nice thought, it could work if people could choose the font and localization is supported. But still things like unit names will still be english...
I don't really have experience with unicode though, but I can at least try to see what has to be done.

Min3mat, that's easy for you to say
china has 1.3 billion inhabitants, so potentially a lot of spring players imo :)

Actually Zaphod, I was thinking about how many C++ programmers there are in China that would want to play Spring in their native language. Why don't you try to get them excited to do it theirselves? Surely you have more pressing matters to attend to, like the merging of the linux port and the damn "new" gui ...

true true,

nonamed, can you search for a chinese development forum and post about your problem there?

Zaphod wrote:... But still things like unit names will still be english...

But the units pack suport for diferent names acording to language, no? If Spring were to be made working with other languages, it might as well also implement the usage of the extra names in the units pack.

1,when we type Chinese charactors ,we just see '???????????',i think that the offical battleroom server does not support Chinese charactors,we need a environment that can display western and eastern charcators CORRECTLY in game chat and battleroom chat.
2.I think that Spring cant display Chinese charactors, so even if I update gui command button to chinese Charactors,we just can see '??????' or others,we need a environment that can display western and eastern charcators CORRECTLY in game gui and all.I suggest Spring use true type fonts(ttf files,why not?)
3.unit's description is much more important than unit's name.but how can i modify the mod files such as *.sd7,*.sdz,some utilities like hpiview and hpipack?
4.battleroom now can be updated online,so ,i think battleroom has better support all languages.

by the way,we have done something on OTA and Spring for Chinese fans,like this:
http://bbs.taclub.net/tabbs/cgi-bin/att ... &type=.jpg
http://bbs.taclub.net/tabbs/cgi-bin/att ... &type=.jpg

It does use truetype fonts, but it only generates textures for characters within the ascii range...
Using the unit FBI files for localization sounds like a bad idea, you'd need to repack all the files and they would have to be saved as unicode as well... I think a seperate localization file with descriptions for every unit in several languages is better...

How many chinese characters would have to be supported by the way?
100? 1000? 10000? I have no idea...

i have no idea too.
size of a full font file contains almost all chinese charactors is 3M up to 13M.

If the size is that big, I think that some languages would have to be an optional extra, as adding 20MB for all the different major languages isnt really a good option, as people will only ever use one or two of these languages. But multilingual support would be good. As long as it brings in more players, or better yet, more coders, I say go for it!

On a similar topic strand... it would be nice if TASers could start and moderate thier own channels. Expecially if anyone can speak in any language in the main channel.

i suggested this 2 times before this is the third the lobby should automaticly join channel by your countrys name so u can write ur own language there

/join #french /join #chinese - how hard is that?

anyways... I think simply getting support up to unicode instead of ascii and allowing people to choose their own fonts would be enough to get people chatting in their own native languages characters.

Masse wrote:i suggested this 2 times before this is the third the lobby should automaticly join channel by your countrys name so u can write ur own language there

That's still a problem in a country with 3 different official languages

SinbadEV wrote:/join #french /join #chinese - how hard is that?

anyways... I think simply getting support up to unicode instead of ascii and allowing people to choose their own fonts would be enough to get people chatting in their own native languages characters.

u like doing that every time u start lobby ? like 20 times a day or something ?
and countrys with 3 or more offical languages can suck my balls and start speaking with one language

The new GUI uses pictures and not text. I think we should thus have pictures of symbols, and allow GUI layouts to be selected by the user and changed around based on language and preference. Eitherway a symbol is universal, a word is not.

The problem is translation and unicode support... hhmm and I totally forgot ym second point

But multilingual support would be good. As long as it brings in more players, or better yet, more coders, I say go for it!

I disagree. Implementation of it is far from trivial if you don't have it in mind from the beginning. And for the coders, they must speak English ofcourse.

sorry but i absolutely agree with most ofthe others; atm there are far more important things to do.

besides, imho everybody should at least understand some basic english if he wants to participate in the community

Well, you seem to ignore that the real problem isnt that the name of the damn tank is stumpy or スタムピ　, but to enable at least talking in the native language by making the chat/lobby unicode-compatible.

Its one thing to use a game, and another to be forced to do all communication in the language of the creators...

before there is any unicode support i hope that ingame chat system will change otherwise it's deficient addition ...

first i really suggest to add ingame "chat history" and specific chat window overlay (e.g. opened by some Function key) ...

for now most of text chat ingame is missing because it "fades" too fast ... especially when "ingame" error / info messages like "unit xy can't reach/build z" appears in same window ... (they both deserve own 'window' and own history)

now imagine this in NATIVE languages (as chinese, japanese, cyrillic or hell even in european languages mean longer discussion and even more chaos :) ...

thx and sorry for "bit" offtopic talk
(btw. i'm czech so i support the idea for non-english users)