German version of Serpent Isle

[artaxerxes]

If there is such a thing and you actually own it, please, I would like to be in touch with you.

With help from others, we are getting Serpent Isle translated in French; but it happens to be that the character set is different between English and French (such as accents).

Thus, we would need to see how the German version is regarding this particular point.

The files needed are: text.flx, usecode and fonts.vga, all found under the /static directory of your SI installation.

Please email the zipped version to artaxerxes2@iname.NOSPAM.com (remove the NOSPAM. part).

I pledge to erase the files once I am finished with them, if EA has a problem with it.

Thanks a lot,

Artaxerxes

[nadir]

I think only the spanish version of SI exists, but I may be wrong.

[artaxerxes]

That's ok, the spanish version would do too!

thx for the info

Artaxerxes

[suraimu]

At the very least, I know there's a German version of BG, as people have
posted images of it in this forum before.

[Darkstar]

Yes, there exists a german version of TBG, but AFAIK Serpent Isle was never released in german.

--Michael

[artaxerxes]

Well, it could be soon....


A small team is working on getting SI in French to be up and running... There are 2 parts to make it happen:

1- translation
2- coding/file tempering

There is not much coding to do (mostly tasks like extracting from flex/recreating the flex/using sed to transform certain characters into those needed).

Since the french fonts.vga also contains the german characters, I assume both french's and german's fonts.vga are identical. If you possess a german version of SI, would you mind sending to me the fonts.vga file so I can verify?

Artaxerxes

[Hacki Dragon]

I think there was only a German version of the SI manual, not the game.

[artaxerxes]

Btw,

would it be legal to redistribute the text.flx, fonts.vga and usecode once we modified them to contain French (or German or whatever)?

I suppose everyone will say IANAL (I am not a lawyer) but still what do you think? Would the exult team accept our files once we've got them?

Artaxerxes

[nadir]

It depends:

text.flx: no problem. It would be completely original
fonts.vga, usecode: problem. Most of the data in these files would stay the same...

In essence I don't believe we (Exult Team) can accept these. You are free to advertise them and distribute them privately to whoever wants them

[Dominus]

Hm, legal issues, good question...

Whatever, as I wrote in the FAQ (he he) there only seems to be the English and Spanish version of SI. We were actually a bit surprised last month when someone with the Spanish version surfaced. Especially as we had to fix an usecode related problem there (the usecode was in a debug state). So it seemed to us that the localization was done rather hastily...

[drcode]

You probably should ask someone at Origin/EA. I just don't know if they'll respond.

[suraimu]

Just make an IPS patch for those files that are not completely your own.
The patch only contains the parts that you've made/changed, so it's
perfectly legal that way.

[artaxerxes]

Suraimu:

2 questions
1- What is an IPS patch?
2- How would Windows users apply the patch? (Unixers have a "patch" command I think would do the trick).

Artaxerxes

[nadir]

In the Free world, there is also xdelta, which is very good at binary patching

[suraimu]

1- Use a search engine to find.
2- There are windows IPS patching utilities, as well as Mac and unix.

[artaxerxes]

I'll tell you what's gonna happen:

I'll make a unix's patch file and windows users will have to contribute the IPS.

After all, I can't be everything to everyone.

Artaxerxes

[suraimu]

What?

Maybe I wasn't clear enough - there are IPS patching utilities for linux,
windows, and mac - the IPS patch files themselves are the same, it's
a standard format.

If you really want to, you can just send me the patched thing through
e-mail and I'll make the IPS patches and put them up on my webpage
or something for you.

[Dominus]

Hm, what you do have to keep in mind though is that you have to choose between patching SI or SI+Add-On.
A patch for SI with the (pre) installed Add-on (Silver Seed) won't work with a SI standalone version (I guess). Please keep that in mind.
And if you do choose to patch the full SI (+Add-on) you should do it with the UC-Version I guess so you are sure not to run into incompatibilites.

[suraimu]

Yeah. My version is the UC version with SS.

[artaxerxes]

Yeah so is mine.

Actually, I've never manage to get a hand on a non-SS version of SI.
We are getting close though.

I need some help to decompile usecode and recomile it. Can someone give me a starting point?


Artaxerxes