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[Amo]

Please folks, don't throw rocks at me.

First of all the situation:
We had done "SUNRISE the game" in late 2007 and turned over to another project which was running parallel but at this point we completely focused on this second project. So for now: We are off WME completely. I mean really completely. Lot of beer and more than a half year of WME abstinence killed several parts of our brains. Now we received the russian translation. Nobody here speaks russian. All the text is in one excel file. What we need now is a step by step advice for braindead people how to prepare WME for one hell of an copy and paste action. For making things even harder: We are using 1.8Beta3 as we released with the beta because we were hard at schedule limit and will be not able to switch to a newer version. We have also (to make the chaos perfect) no text stored in stringtables. Everything is stored in the scripts. Sorry for all the inconvenience, but your help is really appreciated. Thanks so much in advance folks! Missing the Wintermute times...

Amo

[Mnemonic]

We have also (to make the chaos perfect) no text stored in stringtables. Everything is stored in the scripts.

That's a major obstacle.

There's the WME String Table Manager tool. It scans the whole project, and extracts all strings to a string table. That's what you will need to do first. The major pain in the ass here is to only filter the strings that *need* to be localized.

Secondly you will need to edit this string table and replace the strings with translations.

And finally you'll need cyrilic fonts.

[Amo]

Hi Jan,

nice to read a few lines.
Is this Stringtable manager tool already available in 1.8beta3 ? I have no WME open atm.

[Mnemonic]

I think so. Don't remember.

[Amo]

OK, I am back again.
The stringtable manager is available, but we are running into new problems:

First of all: We have here a PC with Russian Win XP and a Russian keyboard and we have a excel table with tons of Russian text.

Now we tried to bring everything together. We opened up a scene in scene edit and copied from the Russian translation a object name and pasted it into the caption gap. In the gap the scene editor shows the right words in Cyrillic. We now saved the scene. We used Aerial and loaded it as ttf and also tried as bmp. In both cases the object caption is empty ingame. When opening the editor again, everything is nice. But only in the editor not ingame.

Any hints what we are doing wrong?

Cheers and a nice evening

Amo

[Mnemonic]

And that's exactly why you should use the string table.

[Amo]

Hi Jan,

thats exactly where the problems start. We tried it with your character demo. Extracted all the strings via stringtable manager which leads to no problems at all. Now we opened up the scripts to check them and yes the "/STR0000/Whatsoever" structure is there. But whats next? When starting the game we see in the credits not "Whatsoever" but "/STR0000/Whatsoever"
 

[metamorphium]

look at method Game.ExpandString(); in the documentation. Should solve your credits problem. Talks would be ok, right?

[Amo]

Yeah, they are right. Thanks for the hint.
O, next thing:
Could we run into some problems if we retrieve the strings with 1.8.6 and then copy the stringtables and modified scripts back into 1.8beta3 (we are still using it, as it was the actual version when we created the goldmaster).

Cheers

Martin

[odnorf]

No, you shouldn't have any problems. But I see no reason to use 1.8beta3. There shouldn't be any incompatibilities. And I believe that any game pass the beta phase, even if it is just for localization.

[Amo]

Hi odnorf,

great to hear that there shouldn't be any problems.
Why using the beta? We tried with later versions but ran into some problems with our animations, something must have changed there, maybe caused by our custom code, anyway, we stay with the beta to keep the risk
at zero.

Cheers

Martin

[odnorf]

Using a beta version for a released commercial game is strange imo. Other than that nothing has changed afaik to cause problems with custom animations. What kind of problems do you have?

[Amo]

Heeh... you can ask question.  I don't remember. Really. As stated in the first post we are almost 3/4years off of WME now. Somehow we decided back in 2007 to stay with the beta3 and because of the fact that the game is done and in stores and only the locas are on the todo list we won't settle to another version.

[Amo]

OK, dammit! We are running into problems. Beta3 now complains, that the scripts are from a newer version... And it now loves to crash at every action without any error message 

[metamorphium]

Try upgrading direct X. Also try to setup in Project Manager Compatibility to "Custom methods behavior compatibility". Other than that. I don't know why it wouldn't work... Are you using some custom dll's?