Re: [Adonthell-devel] i18n progress

[Alexandre Courbot]

> It might be neccessary to have our own gettext layer. After all, there
> is only one function we must make available to Python scripts: gettext.
> Everything else is handled by the engine. That means it would work with
> versions of Python that came without gettext support. That's probably
> better than forcing everyone to upgrade to Python 2.1 or greater if they
> could be using older versions as well. 

Excellent point.

> > Does it mean that translations are done within dlgedit? That would be
> > great for user-friendlyness, but in this case each dialog would be
> > contained in it's own catalog, right? 
> 
> No. That wouldn't really work, I think. After you finished a
> translation, you can view the result in dlgedit. That's more convenient
> than testing the translation in the game, as that makes certain parts of
> a dialogue difficult to reach. But if you spot an error, you'll have to
> correct it by hand in the catalog source, then regenerate the binary
> catalog file. Maybe, at a later stage this could be automated, but right
> now I don't even want to think about that ;).
> 
> Anyway, for this feature, it does not matter whether all translations
> are in a single or in different catalogs. You load a catalog, and if it
> contains the text of the dialogue you have currently loaded, the
> translation is applied, otherwise it isn't.

Allright. While being tempting, I think giving the opportunity to
translate dialogs within dlgedit would be an error. Translations apply
to a whole game, not only dialogs - and dlgedit is for dialog editing
only. Moreover, there are plenty of user-friendly tool available to ease
the translator's task.

> > Wasn't our goal to only have one
> > catalog per game, which contains all the strings, so it is loaded once
> > at game start? 
> 
> Exactly. That's what we will do. Actually, I would suggest that we offer
> an option for the player to chose a certain language at runtime. That's
> more convenient than having to alter or set environment variables. But
> even then, we would only use one catalog, but discard it and load
> another one if the player switches the language.

Perfect. I totally agree about the in-game language selection too. All
this will turn very nifty! :)

As we are speaking about backporting, maybe i18n could make it into
Waste's Edge too, with the new dialog engine, once it's finished.

Alex.
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