2010-01-11, 05:53 PM
For the record, the first edition of Dark Destiny is going to have some extensions setup which will allow players to fully enjoy the game from an optical drive (cdrom or dvd) and fixes a bug which made Som crawl to very very low FPS if your save game folder happened to be on an external drive (USB or network etc.)
You can maybe make it do other tricks if you get a hold of some documentation for the extension ini files. I think we're trying to focus on better delivering the movies, but I've moved on to focusing on the translation feature which will make it very easy to translate all Som games into any language and make use of Unicode. As soon as that work is finished there will be a website setup where anyone can go to help translate games collaboratively like a wiki (or privately if desired)
The website will be basically like an online version of poedit. Anyone can download the translation file and add it to their game at any point along the way. It can't be any easier than that
PS: Translation support is 99% there but the last 1% of text is made trickier because it turned out that Som uses an internal library for sprintf() functionality for Shift_JIS text (instead of the Windows API) ...So I'm having to implement the menu doctoring extension earlier than expected (or at least half of it) so that messages can be decomposed and reconstructed. The simplest example is the status conditions display in the menu. Instead of translating every possible combination of "bad status conditions" the conditions need to be broken up so they can be translated one at a time then put back together to be printed on the screen. For that you need a representation of the menu built in (which is what's taking a little longer... that and having stopped to focus on DD for some time)
EDITED: Oh yeah, the tool suite that dumps (preps for translation) the text from any game in .po (gettext) format was finished ages ago.
You can maybe make it do other tricks if you get a hold of some documentation for the extension ini files. I think we're trying to focus on better delivering the movies, but I've moved on to focusing on the translation feature which will make it very easy to translate all Som games into any language and make use of Unicode. As soon as that work is finished there will be a website setup where anyone can go to help translate games collaboratively like a wiki (or privately if desired)
The website will be basically like an online version of poedit. Anyone can download the translation file and add it to their game at any point along the way. It can't be any easier than that
PS: Translation support is 99% there but the last 1% of text is made trickier because it turned out that Som uses an internal library for sprintf() functionality for Shift_JIS text (instead of the Windows API) ...So I'm having to implement the menu doctoring extension earlier than expected (or at least half of it) so that messages can be decomposed and reconstructed. The simplest example is the status conditions display in the menu. Instead of translating every possible combination of "bad status conditions" the conditions need to be broken up so they can be translated one at a time then put back together to be printed on the screen. For that you need a representation of the menu built in (which is what's taking a little longer... that and having stopped to focus on DD for some time)
EDITED: Oh yeah, the tool suite that dumps (preps for translation) the text from any game in .po (gettext) format was finished ages ago.