Languages

[Mikero]

Jeez, I feel like a real noob in this territory

Folks I found an interesting thing about language selection while testing Student Pilot's Red Tide in the beta missions area.

The scenario was, Student made two separate pbo's. One an English/German pbo, the other, a one-off Portuguese pbo. The construct of this was of course that the 'portuguese' pbo would use the default settings, default html files, eg, which were wriitten in Portuguese. This 'construct' would be familiar territory for Russians or any author whose native language isn't one of the 'official' six.

It turns out to be unnecessary.

As you all know Portuguese is not a configurable language in the config gui, nor for that matter, many languages (Turkish, Latvian, blah). It seemed to me to be artificially restricted, and so it turned out to be.

All you have to do, to include 'some other language' is as follows

edit your flashpoint.cfg file in the main directory so that

Language="Pongolian";

Provide two html files as Overview.Pongolian.html and
Briefing.Pongolian.html (Ie what you've always done for any of the 'official' languages)

In your stringtable.csv

LANGUAGE,English,French,Italian,Spanish,German,Pongolian,Comment

Ie, just add another column

then, obviously and of course, add pongolian sentences to each of the phrases in that csv file *exactly* as you would for German, French or any of the other 'official' ones.

Separately, this doesn't have a bearing on the stringtable in the bin folder, eg the one for all the "where are yous", "danger", "keep low"

I have tried editing *that* file, but it is completely ignored in game play and is probably there for the editor only. I wouldn't know.

The important bit is that all of above works, and doesn't crash ofp.

Edit:

and the really good news is that selecting Pongolian as your language of choice (Turkish eg) has NO BEARING on missions that do not have pongolian strings. Eg the engine simply defaults to english.

Voila

[THobson]

This feels like the begining of a turotial.  Why not pull all the language stuff together and put it in the Editor's Dept?

[qqqqqq]

How does the player of the mission select Pongolian?

[Mikero]

>How does the player of the mission select Pongolian?

Yes, I didn't make that bit clear

edit your flashpoint.cfg file in the main directory so that

Language="Pongolian";

voila.

this  is the *only* thing that the preferences gui does. Except the preferences gui has a fixed five or six to choose from.

For most players you can relax and leave it at that setting because for all other missions it doesn't exist and will default to english.

@Thob

because if you saw the backlog of pending items, you wouldn't go near it i guess.

[Hauk]

nice mikero  

It'll help those parts of the community whose language isn't english a hell of a lot!! It sure is handy though, having english as your first language <joke joke joke!!>

Nice job, i suppose its time for a tutorial  

Hauk

[Mikero]

@Hauk

yes, thanks. I will write one, but already I'm finding the replies very helpful.

>helpful whose language isn't english a hell of a lot

quite. Right now we have a situation where 'other' langauges are just using the default overview, default briefing.html's to write in their language .  And why the hell shouldn't they!

The problem comes for them when they want more exposure for their mission (read English). So what to do? They've already used up the default (english) settings.

We then get things like MacGuba's excellent un-impossible mission where there is in fact a polish version, but to use it, you have to do a lot of copy and renaming of files.

Changing the config with a few simple keystrokes solves that issue, permanently.

thanx for your feedback people. I am surprised this apparently simple tweak isn't so widely known.

Edit:
ok, supplied a tute here

any comments or corrections always appreciated.

[wcrvieira]

Thanks a lot mate...

Gonna read the tute even if you had helped me before... but still gonna make it a go!

Take care
BV

PS:: Dont believe what BBC tells you about Portugal these days...
Completely untrue... i saw it and made me angry stupid guys...
They were not portuguese people they were african!