Localization System and Databases

Greetings, prisoners!

Today we’re going to talk about the progress we’ve made on the translation system we want to implement in the game. The post we’re sharing today is, like many of the things still to come, one of the foundations that will shape the future of La Prisión.

I’ve always believed that game localization is important, and that the minimum language every game should include is English. It’s a very important language, spoken by the majority, and it allows the world to discover works that would otherwise be limited to the few who speak the original language.

But I have also always believed that a game must respect its roots and the country where it was produced, and that includes adding Spanish as a language to the game. Therefore, there is no other solution than to ensure a system that allows any language to be added to the game, and offers, compared to other more traditional solutions, genuine day-to-day assistance within the walls of La Prisión.

Tool for Unity

We are developing a tool for internal use in Unity with the aim of accelerating and streamlining the localization process.

These are the features of the <irony>originally named: Localization Editor</irony>:

Binary serialization of content in UTF-16 to support complex languages like Japanese or, who knows, future alien languages more complex than we can imagine today :P.
Import and export in CSV format, a well-known format in the translation field.
Static and dynamic translation system, that is: text that does not change and text requested by the code at runtime.
Resource path system: A utility for assets and binary content elements such as images or sounds.
Duplication system: A common issue in translation systems is creating unnecessary duplicates, such as creating two keys with the same content in different namespaces. Our tool will detect and flag such duplicates.
Some bugs to fix: This is a very common feature in any tool…

Not all features are finished yet, but enough are ready to consider it usable in the game’s main repository.

Change in-game language

I admit that this is perhaps more of a personal whim than a real necessity for the game, and the truth is that I’ll never forget how ingenious I found this feature, back in the day, in a World of Warcraft addon whose name I can never remember.

La Prisión is, by its very nature, a Spanish-language game with limited resources, and that means that, if in the future, someone who speaks a different language wants to know the original name of a particular item in Spanish, this feature will allow them to search for information online—something they wouldn’t be able to find as easily by searching for the translated name.

It’s true that you can always go to Options, Languages, and change it. But why not allow a keyboard shortcut that does it in real time? Isn’t it more convenient for those people to glance at the original name for a few seconds, right within the game itself, and then switch back to their language? I think so, and I believe someone will eventually find it useful.

As you can see in the video below, not all the text has been implemented yet, as some features of the tool still need to be fine-tuned.

Seeking inspiration from Asheron’s Call for the database

On January 31, 2017, not long before La Prisión did, the massively multiplayer online game Asheron’s Call shut its doors for good. The community that surrounded that game went through the same thing our community is going through these days, and although I don’t know if it was with or without help from the original staff, the community created a free server emulator, available on GitHub:

https://github.com/ACEmulator/ACE

Thanks to their contribution, our team has been able to examine how it works, incorporating into our database techniques that were used for this game, which was so famous in its day.

If you’re a developer, I invite you to take a look—it’s written in clean, modern C# that’s easy to understand and packed with great ideas.

Greetings to all!
The new team at La Prisión