Oolite Bulletins

People here are working on translations (I will help too), so what's the status of it ?

The gamepart (Lists, Objects and Messages) is easy, the descriptions of planets can wait.

Will there be a chooser in the menu or will the game take the language of the system ?

Italian: Complete and downloadable from here. But I will need to rework it for 1.73 a bit.

German: Has made good progress, however present status is unknown. Commander McLane who was working on it has not shown up for a while.

Polish: OSH was working on it. Current status is unknown and I think there were some problems related to planet descriptions.

My advice to translators: The planet descriptions are there to create effect, they do not influence the functionality of the game. If you have issues with the combination of the planet description arrays, I would recommend not attempting to translate exactly, feel free to create your own arrays as you see fit and make them match your target language syntax patterns.

The translations currently come in the form of OXPs. You just install the OXP containing the language of your choice and launch the game. That's really all there is to it. Default game language is always English.

First things first, hearty greetings to all!

I've been playing Oolite for months (alas having idle periods), and been reading these boards also and I, well, to be honest, just love you guys! The game is wonderful and the way you live in it, tell about it, write stories, backgrounds is none the less... Oh, I'm getting too emotional it seems.

So, emotions aside, I finally decided to join the boards and also offer any help I could provide. But I've been away from here for a while and don't actually remember where to post this question... I'd like to participate in translating Oolite too, and I'm Russian, so... well, what/how can I begin, where/who I'd need to write to, etc?..

As I said in my PM - welcome to the friendliest board this side of Reidquat(tm).

I can't answer your question but I'm sure some of the guys involved in their own local language variants will be along soon.

I took the OoliteItaliano_v1.2.zip as guideline and translated already 80% into German, but the "Planet description generator" is a hard Sudoku !

( BTW, is there a list of the "%R - random digrams" ? - Question canceled I found it unter "Planet names and other random names". Sorry)

DaddyHoggy, thanks, I'm really glad being here

SwissMäc, yeah, I took that one too, but I think it'd be easier for me to take default files from Resources as a reference, since I don't actually know Italian language . The structure seems pretty obvious, but there are still some questions as of yet.

I'm having trouble with encodings. I see that Oolite has a 256-character font. I also assume it reads descriptions.plist as UTF-8 file (with UNIX-style EOL). And, well, if I add some Russian text to the file and save it as UTF-8, I get question marks instead of texture symbols (which, I guess, happens because those symbols actually have two-byte codes in UTF-8, thus not mapping to 256 characters). Can anyone make this thing a bit clearer?

Silly me, should have used search better... I found this discussion and dowloaded files provided by Ahruman. The text started to appear readable with cyrillic characters, though there are troubles with character widths, but that won't prove to be much of a problem I foresee.

German translation finished (for Version v1.72.2.1)! Juhuu!

But the view_description = "Rear View" didn't change, neither the small HUD ?

But with a Cobra Mark 3 everything is fine, tested on a Mac.
To whom can I send/upload it ?

You can try uploading it to the wiki if you already have an account. If you don't, then uploading it to any file hosting site like box.net or similar should be OK. We could pick it up from there and upload it to the wiki at a later point in time.

The small hud requires translation as well. hud-small.plist is the file you will need to translate. This is an issue also with the Italian version and thanks for noting it. For the rear view string, I am pretty confident it must be some typo in the relevant key in descriptions.plist. For rear view it should be "aft-view-string".

The Wiki (http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Special:Upload) said:
"The upload directory (/var/www/vhosts/wiki/www/images) is not writable by the webserver."

So you can find it at: http://www.file-upload.net/download-162 ... p.zip.html

It's still Beta, I didn't found the keys for the custom view/external view, it's still "Rear Right View" and the hud-small.plist gets ignored.

Oh, I see what you mean. The external view descriptions are defined inside shipdata.plist, like this: You will need to translate the view_description. You are either missing this translation or an OXP of the same ship appears later in your OXP list and overrides the translated description with the english one. The same should be the case for small-hud.plist. Probably another OXP that comes later is redefining it and turns it back to English. Best way to test this assumption would be to remove all OXPs except your localization one and see if this persists.

Hmm, as to this kind of thing, when an OXP overrides another... It may have already been discussed somewhere, but is there a way that an OXP can check for another OXP presence? I mean, for people to be able to make multilingual OXPs (if they add new missions or just some strings, etc.) and choose appropriate text for the 'current' Oolite language (or of course, for other people to adapt existing OXPs to other languages).

I found it, the files were coded as Latin-1 not UTF-8. It works till the first Non-Standard-ASCII-Character, after a äöü it gets ignored.

Here the corrected version:
http://www.file-upload.net/download-162 ... p.zip.html

This is a very nice piece of work indeed, SwissMäc. Just one thing to note:
In the shipyard screen, when the main ship's weapon has been upgraded, the phrase "Vordere Waffe aufgewertet zu strahllaser", as an example, comes up. I think (and please correct me if I am wrong) that in German the word strahllaser should be capitalized. Just wanted to say that Oolite will let you capitalize this correctly, if you set the key lowercase_ignore to true in descriptions.plist. This will also allow for correct capitalization of the adjectives in the paragraph describing passenger contracts. By the way, it looks like that particular section has some English text forgotten there. I read: "Za Esal, a Rote gehornte Menschlich, wishes to go to Rateedar").

You're right, I have it in uppercase in the text and it gets overridden but I can't find the lowercase settings ?


No, I haven't forgot that, but I discovered a strange behavior, if you hold shift at the start of Oolite, all the OXP will be reloaded, but not complete if you hold shift when you open a saved game.

"contracts-@-a-@-wishes-to-go-to-@" = "%@, ein %@, möchte nach %@.";

The first %@ is the name and is OK.
The second %@ is the species, but where will it be defined, it have to adapt it for german ?
The third %@ is the destination an correct, too.