multilangage in your game

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/multilangage in your game

hub	(Posted 2007) [#1]

Hi !

How to organize your code to support multilangage
At this time, i use global variables like this

Notify gMessage_206$

and at the start of the program a function to choose the langage

Global gMessage_206$, gMessage_207$

Function Choose_langage (Langage$)
	
	select Langage$

		Case "Francais"
			gMEssage_206$ = "erreur"
			gMessage_207$ = "bonjour"
		
		Case "English"
			gMessage_206$ = "error"
			gMessage_207$ = "hello"
	end select
	

End Function

But have you a better idea ? (more easy to maintain
to evit to create the gMessage_206b$ if i've a new message
between 206 and 207 !!!)

Thanks for your help.

Brucey

(Posted 2007) [#2]

You probably want to use a "localization" module, perhaps something along the lines of :

http://brucey.net/programming/blitz/index.php#bahlocale

...and if I could use Search properly, I would also link to some others.

deps	(Posted 2007) [#3]

I haven't done anything like this, but I would probably go with a string array and a bunch of consts.

const MSG_KILLED:int = 0
const MSG_WIN:int = 1
const MSG_LOST:int = 2
const MSG_GOTSHOTGUN:int = 3


global msg_list:string[10]

function load_language( filename:string )
    ' Load from filename
    ' stuff it in msg_list
endfunction


' Later in the game
show_game_message( MSG_GOTSHOTGUN )

Grey Alien

(Posted 2007) [#4]

All my text is in a Unicode text file. I read this in and display it in-game. This file can then be edited by language specialists and because it's Unicode, special characters, even Cyrillic can be used.

xlsior

(Posted 2007) [#5]

How to organize your code to support multilangage
At this time, i use global variables like this

Notify gMessage_206$

It's probably a better way to organize it slightly different:
1) Use multiple language files
2) make the content something logical:

english.txt
<206> error
<207> hello

french.txt
<206> erreur
<207> bonjour

3) read the strings into an array or something
4) simply print element 206 or 207 -- the language selection at the beginning would have pre-loaded the strings for a particular language, no need to cycle through all the language options each time you need to print something

Optionally you could incbin the various language files so you still have a single .exe file

xlsior

(Posted 2007) [#6]

...and if I could use Search properly, I would also link to some others.

somewhat off-topic, but:

I personally have found that it's a *lot* easier to search the forums simply by going to google.com, enter the search terms, and add site:blitzmax.com in the search box to restrict the results to those on this site.

A zillion times faster than using the forum's built-in search options, and it also searches the code archives(!!)
The only downside is that it's not up-to-the-minute, but so far it's seemed fairly thorough.

Grey Alien

(Posted 2007) [#7]

Hub. my framework has a TGameText type and supporting functions that let's you read in the Unicode text file. You have it right? It doe only read in one language though, the idea being you release different language versions, but the same could could be modified to read in only one language from a multi-language file using xlsior's method easily.

xlsior: Totally agree about google, it's faster and better for combo words etc.