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Would a Japanese, Chinese, or Korean translation be viable?

Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2019 10:15 am
by EyeBeat
I am just curious as to how hard that would be to do?

Has anyone mentioned doing anything with these languages?

I do not speak them personally but I feel bad that they never got to play such an amazing game. At the same time it would also bolster up the modding community I believe.

Re: Would a Japanese, Chinese, or Korean translation be viable?

Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2019 7:12 am
by BansheeXYZ
Daggerfall's original font is 6px high with 1px linespacing. So I've read, the minimum readable height for Japanese characters is 9px. You'd have to enforce a higher minimum resolution I think, and render fonts in a more flexible way. I don't know if this is planned.

Another obstacle for translators is going to be how margins are currently set. Translated lines in say, Spanish, will be longer than their English counterparts. That means you'll have to hand-format new linebreaks to avoid overflow. I think this will be the easiest obstacle to fix, but I got no response when suggesting it.

The third problem is the original UI. It is very cramped even for English. Look at, for example, the keybindings screen. Spanish for "strafe left" is "ametrallar a la izquierda." That text is also baked in. Spell names can show 22 characters before truncation and some already are before translation. We're going to need a new UI that widens every area to better utilize the space that modern resolutions grant us. It may have to come as a forked project further down the road as this hasn't gained the traction I'd hoped it would. I'm talking to some programmer friends, but no promises dude.

Re: Would a Japanese, Chinese, or Korean translation be viable?

Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2019 1:49 am
by EyeBeat
BansheeXYZ wrote: Wed Jul 31, 2019 7:12 am Daggerfall's original font is 6px high with 1px linespacing. So I've read, the minimum readable height for Japanese characters is 9px. You'd have to enforce a higher minimum resolution I think, and render fonts in a more flexible way. I don't know if this is planned.

Another obstacle for translators is going to be how margins are currently set. Translated lines in say, Spanish, will be longer than their English counterparts. That means you'll have to hand-format new linebreaks to avoid overflow. I think this will be the easiest obstacle to fix, but I got no response when suggesting it.

The third problem is the original UI. It is very cramped even for English. Look at, for example, the keybindings screen. Spanish for "strafe left" is "ametrallar a la izquierda." That text is also baked in. Spell names can show 22 characters before truncation and some already are before translation. We're going to need a new UI that widens every area to better utilize the space that modern resolutions grant us. It may have to come as a forked project further down the road as this hasn't gained the traction I'd hoped it would. I'm talking to some programmer friends, but no promises dude.
Thanks for the reply. Sounds like something that can be worked on later. But it also sounds like a daunting process.