Expanding Uru's International Audience via Fan Ages

[Jennifer_P]

It occurred to me awhile ago that we could really help Uru's popularity in non-English-speaking countries by providing support for other languages in our Ages. This way, Uru would be a lot more friendly and accessible to internationals, and we could expand the game's fanbase too.
How simple would it be to have, say, some sort of language menu you could choose from after entering an Age? This variable would need to change all or most of the in-game text from journals to stone carvings to speeches by holograms/whatevers into the player's language of choice. Not knowing of any coding problems with this (yet), the only two problems I can think of are the aesthics of the menu display system and the IC/OOC implications of displaying said menu. But I think that those are really pretty minor issues...
So, just something to be aware of as we begin making our Ages.

[bluewyvern]

That's a really nice thought. I have an even simpler idea for implementing it: write all of the Age's notebooks and accompanying texts multilingually.

When you think about it, all the texts you read in our Ages are going to have been written or translated by the Writers, Maintainers, scholars, and whoever else first visits the Age. They will either be our field notes, observations and discoveries about the new Age, or translations of the texts left behind by the inhabitants, because whoever was there and left their diaries and notes and messages didn't know English, that's for sure. They will either be originally in D'ni, if we do do D'ni Ages, or in a never-before seen language that will have to be deciphered and translated super fast by our resident crack team of genius exolinguists, if they're from an entirely new civilization that's never had any contact with Earth or D'ni.

We were lucky enough in all the Myst games to be following in the footsteps of Atrus and his family, who obligingly spoke English (or French, or German, etc., depending on your version of the game, but it came from the surface in any event), but that's not going to be the case any more.

I'm thinking, a journal, the diary of an Age inhabitant, filled with strange and unfamiliar symbols, and next to it a DRC-style ruled notebook with a linguist's translation of the text for the explorers to read. If we want to make this appeal to an international audience, we can just do that in multiple languages, provided we can find people to do the translations.

In the case of Maintainers' and Writers' notes about the Age, same thing -- the original journal in English, with a companion volume of translations done by helpful volunteers. (Technologically) easy to implement, makes perfect sense IC, and everything.

[Jennifer_P]

I agree, that method works the best for the more "official" texts, but then there might be (for example) a secret journal of an English-speaking character that is ICly meant not to have been discovered by the maintainers. In this case, IC there wouldn't need to be an linguist's translation, and there wouldn't be any reason for the journal to be written in multiple languages either. So that's one situation where it would be good to have multiple versions (or maybe instances) of a journal.

[JulyForToday]

If you visit the age Jonae from the ULM public ages, its all in Dutch.

The only thing is writing in other languages is a double edged sword. I can't read a word of writing in that age. If that age does have a good story, I wouldn't know it because I can't read anything! lol

Official Uru content used to be available in multiple languages. There was spanish, french, german, and italian versions. But they might have taken that out for now to streamline the amount of harddisk space Uru uses up. I think the best policy is that based on what setting the user has for languages, it just downloads the corresponding language files.

As far as user ages go the english content could be translated for other languages, and would work under the same system of which language you choose.

[Pryftan]

In single player Uru, the language setting is all handled by Python scripts that choose the particular translation of journal to show depending on the language choice. I think we could easily do the same sort of thing with our own accompaniment script, though I don't at all know how that sort of thing works with MOUL..

[Trylon]

If you visit the age Jonae from the ULM public ages, its all in Dutch.

Nope, it ain't....

It's German

I should know, I speak English, German and Dutch (oh and American )

[BAD]

MOUL works very similarly as Uru single player, and Until Uru.

I haven't cracjed any of the MOUL files open (and don't plan to without permission from Cyan) so I am unsure if they streamlined how the texts are handled.

I doubt they have since that would only be a minor save on resources.

If MOUL does work as UU did, I can tell you that all the texts are saved in python already translated into all the languages that single player Uru could use. It only takes a little bit of python coding to add your texts, and all the translations into a python file that would work on UU. We actually had changed a bunch of texts as a joke on the Slackers Shard for admins only.

If you are really interested, and have some python experience, I can look at my old notes and find where in the python.pak file you can look to study the files structure from the offline game.

At that point we only need translators.

What I think would be cool, is to create an age that is set up to help translate D'ni and other non surface languages (indigenous languages of different ages). Kind of like a giant mechanical Rosetta stone.

[r'Tayrtahn]

What I think would be cool, is to create an age that is set up to help translate D'ni and other non surface languages (indigenous languages of different ages). Kind of like a giant mechanical Rosetta stone.

Excellent idea, BAD!! <note to self...>