Ultima in other Languages

[Tolotos]

Hi,
I thought it gave Ultima 7 - BG with a german language pack.
Is that right, and when not is a language Pack planned?
Maybe for SI too.
Because its sometimes very difficult to follow the plot in a other language as in your own facing such enormous dialogs.

[Wizardry Dragon]

I know that there's a French translation ongoing, but I'm unaware of a german BG translation.

Although, when Ultima VII: TFL matures, we will be providing it in french and german, among other languages.

---------
Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

[Skutarth]

I encourage you to start working on it yourself, though. Spread the joy of Ultima 7 to speakers of your native language!

[WWWWolf]

I think U7BG has an official German translation. U7SI apparently doesn't have such thing.

By the way, does anyone have any ideas on how to make translation tools that are not really that tricky to use? Uh, Serpent Isle French translators had some tools but they were... a little bit complex, shall we say?
...now that I have MySQL around, maybe I should take another look at that stuff...

[Wizardry Dragon]

A conversation editing tool would be nice, to that end.


... the first person that says UCC gets shot.

-----------
Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

[artaxerxes]

A few comments:

the translation tools I made for Si-french are not the easiest indeed, but if you follow the instructions, you should be ok. We consider the translation of Serpent Isle in French finished, even though it could ALWAYS use a bit of polishing.

On that note, the Italian translation team has created a Windows tool to translate and I think it might do the trick for you. I do have contact information if you need them. They're nice folks too. Only issue is that it's Windows only.

Also, translating Ultima 7 (either part) is a major undertaking. You have to be well coordinated and patient. You also have to edit fonts in case the default fonts do not suffice you. You also have to use binary patches since you cannot legally distribute a "usecode" or a "fonts.vga" file. I have made such a tool called "patcher", available on sf.net/projects/si-french. You might have to update the code since it checks for a SI+SS version of those files.

And if you need help to get started, I'd be glad to show you the way!

Artaxerxes
co-lead, si-french team

[Wizardry Dragon]

To clarify a misconception that could come out of Ataxerxes' post: usecode and vga files are not illegal to distribtute in and of themselves. However, merely translating the text within a program is considered a derivative work of the program and therefore falls under the copyright of the original program.

This is one reason why mods' usecode and .vga files are appended to the original one, instead of containing all the graphics. The other reason is simpler: efficiency.

--------
Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer,
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

[WWWWolf]

Okay, I just checked the si-french tools and I just realised that it's far easier to write a really simple and nice tool of my own for this stuff, if I ever get on with my Finnish translation idea. =)

The tools aren't all that bad really, just that they're pretty old and rusted and there's no documentation and there's a bunch of perl-fu involved. Did a lot of swearing, though most of that coming from the fact that I had no idea how to do the splitting of code and data, even when I really remember doing that earlier (nothing a good 15 mins of Perl can solve)... and secondly from the weird DB schema (function counts on tables? What for? We have subselects... oh, wait, " Server version 3.23.54", never mind.)

But I think I will manage to write my own translation tool eventually - 640 lines of PHP, isn't that like 2.5 lines of Ruby of Rails? =)

[artaxerxes]

hey man, I'm all for better tools! I've slaped those together to have something running and working for us and although it did the job, if you can make something better, just do it!

Like I said, the Italian team has done a great tool but Windows only. I can put you in touch with them if you wanted.

thx
Artaxerxes

[WWWWolf]

I'm already half-done with my translation tool. Ruby on Rails *rocks.* 20 mins and I suddenly had a tool to map my functions. 40 mins later I had figured out the contents of half of the functions. Throw in another 30 mins of coding tomorrow and I'm probably happily translating after that. =)

Just that importing all of the strings to the database gave me a kind of "this thing has *how much* text?" kind of feeling. When I started figuring out what speech is where, I found a bunch of NPCs I've probably never even met in the game. This is going to be very fascinating if and when I ever get done with this.

It's just that my projects have a really annoying side of drying up at some point. =/ I guess I just have to work slowly with this. Expect the thing to be translated in a couple of years earliest...

[drcode]

I'd guess that each Ultima7 part has as much text as a full-sized novel. It's a large part of what makes these games so addictive.

[DK]

Greetings,
I'm from the italian translator group who have translated Ultima7 part1 (and we are translating U7 Part2).
First, I must thank the Exult Team to make this translation possibile.
The translation of a game like Ultima7 is very, very big and not so easy, with over 1.6MB of text!!!
For only one person is a very difficult task, better create a group of translator.
I've created a tool to make this translation very "easy"; it have many features: automatic extract/reinsert text in the usecode, search & replace, function to work in team, automatic recompilation of function opcode from 16bit to 32bit (needed for large text like in the books) and other useful functions.
The editor is well tested; we have finished Ultima7 Part 1 translation.
The only part left, is the small graphic editing; you must use GIMP (or any graphical editor) and the tools/plugin from Exult.
However we are disposal to help other people with this graphical things.
If someone want try the editor, I've made a little page (a small guide is with the editor itself)
[url]http://ultima.oldgamesitalia.com/u7tool/[url]
Hope can be useful.