2009-10-12, 10:48 PM
Just to be sure no one misses this development, here is a thread announcing that I've in place a system that can rewrite SOM's text just before it's displayed in the game.
With this we can do a lot of things. For one we can use traditional internationalization methods (namely gettext) to make your games translatable into any language without modifying your game after it's produced. For already existing games like DoM/Trismegistus, you can enjoy this by just dropping some dlls and translation files into your game folder (I can implement this immediately btw)
Technically the system is just about as good as it will ever need to be. But I guess the rest of the work will be devising systems to make it easier and easier for everyone to take advantage of (eg. configuration)
Some examples of how I will be using it with my game project are...
A) I want to remove x1 from the inventory lists because it looks tacky and for most items there is only one of them in the game anyway.
B) I wanted all my stats to be single digits but once John worked out the stat formulas it was obvious this would never work. So I ended up multiply all my equip stats by 10, and now I can use the rewriter to chop of the 0s so they will look like single digits again.
C) I have shops setup that are really more like storage. So I had changed the Buy/Sell to be a more generic Take/Give dialog. But now I can recognize when the player is at a proper shop and change it back to Buy/Sell which seems obviously more appropriate.
So yeah, according to C, you can even change text based on what values are in your event counters on the fly. I have a feeling there will be many more instances where this will come in handy for me, and if you take the liberty to really open your mind about all the possibilities this will open up, you just might start to imagine how your own projects could take advantage of such a system.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to integrate this into your project, I will do what I can to help custom program whatever you need for you.
Can I get an amen
With this we can do a lot of things. For one we can use traditional internationalization methods (namely gettext) to make your games translatable into any language without modifying your game after it's produced. For already existing games like DoM/Trismegistus, you can enjoy this by just dropping some dlls and translation files into your game folder (I can implement this immediately btw)
Technically the system is just about as good as it will ever need to be. But I guess the rest of the work will be devising systems to make it easier and easier for everyone to take advantage of (eg. configuration)
Some examples of how I will be using it with my game project are...
A) I want to remove x1 from the inventory lists because it looks tacky and for most items there is only one of them in the game anyway.
B) I wanted all my stats to be single digits but once John worked out the stat formulas it was obvious this would never work. So I ended up multiply all my equip stats by 10, and now I can use the rewriter to chop of the 0s so they will look like single digits again.
C) I have shops setup that are really more like storage. So I had changed the Buy/Sell to be a more generic Take/Give dialog. But now I can recognize when the player is at a proper shop and change it back to Buy/Sell which seems obviously more appropriate.
So yeah, according to C, you can even change text based on what values are in your event counters on the fly. I have a feeling there will be many more instances where this will come in handy for me, and if you take the liberty to really open your mind about all the possibilities this will open up, you just might start to imagine how your own projects could take advantage of such a system.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to integrate this into your project, I will do what I can to help custom program whatever you need for you.
Can I get an amen