How much dev time would localization support take?

[vatas]

Title, if Jorb & Loftar would add native support for localization (changing all text in game to another language) how long would that take?

I'm presuming player volunteers would handle the actual translations, and there have already been localization for at least Russian (and IIRC, Chinese, Korean and Japanese) that relied on Amber custom client.

[yozzik111]

Will gladly join and help with translation to ukrainian.

[shubla]

Probably quite a bunch of work because its scattered all around. Some is hardcoded into various places in the client, some in resource files and maybe even server.

[jorb]

Many text sources, and lots of metadata on specific words required if it is to be rendered well in various languages. Not trivial.

[loftar]

One of the main problems is that the game does relatively complex linguistic manipulations (at least compared to how many other localization systems work). Among other things, there are functions for generating indefinite, genitive and plural forms of words (all of which are quite hacky and depend highly on these things being relatively simple in English), and in some cases such things are done as merging clauses (which currently uses the property of English that dependent and independent clauses use the same form). That is why, as Jorb says, there'd need to be a lot of metadata about every text resource, so that it can be inflected into whatever grammatical context it needs to be put in. I also wouldn't want to implement this in several places, so I'd probably want to move all text sources out of the server and put them into resources or something, so that the entire thing can be implemented only in the client.

It is something that I've been thinking about to and fro over the years if only out of academical curiosity, so I wouldn't be surprised if I make it happen sooner or later, but it's not a small thing for sure, and not exactly at the top of the priority list.

[yozzik111]

That means "will consider" ©, and that is good enough.

[Opexum]

This game seems to be huge but i dont really understand how to play and what to do.
The language is a big wall for understanding. I'm not english native and i wish that you can translate in french all menu and toolbar because now i swim in the dark.
Regards.

[terechgracz]

learn

[srt66]

Go watch youtube