Translation of EBII?

**lykeas** · 12-07-2009, 23:17

Hi guys!!

I am new in this particular forum but I was wondering if there's any project about translating EBII to other languages. Specificly I am talking about spanish since I have noticed that there's a huge spaniard and south american community already enjoying the wonderful EBI. Marauding thorugh some of their forums I have come across more than once with the topic of transaltion.

I think having EBII in different language will increase the fame and the amount of players of that Mod throughout the world as well as broadening its unequivocal educational purpose.

Personally I would be disposed to take part in such venture if there are others interested and willing to get involved(spanish is one of my mother tongues). Anyway, I would like to hear the opinions of the EB team regarding that or from anyone who wants to give me his/her feedback.

Regards!

**ziegenpeter** · 12-07-2009, 23:54

Well I think this is more the task for a fan-based project than something for the main team. For german players, there is also a translation project going on, although I'm not using it...

**lykeas** · 12-08-2009, 18:38

thanks for your reply!!!

**Nachtmeister** · 12-09-2009, 16:51

Hey, why not?
Maybe fans willing to translate could join the team for this purpose, making the whole thing a bit more *efficient* (where do I have to change what and where do I NOT want to edit anything to prevent any possible instability because of game engine read-operations from certain text files, etc)...
I can't translate into spanish, but I can translate into german and would make myself available. In case the team is not so interested - where do I find this german port project?

**Jerat** · 12-10-2009, 05:31

Originally Posted by Nachtmeister

In case the team is not so interested - where do I find this german port project?

http://www.totalwar-zone.de/forum/mo...5/index12.html
Ich habe aber leider keine Ahnung, ob an dem Projekt noch gearbeitet wird.

**ziegenpeter** · 12-10-2009, 16:20

Genau den meinte ich.

Last entry is 12.11.09, so there is a chance

**Skullheadhq** · 12-12-2009, 13:32

Just keep it english, you might learn a bit english while playing it

**Folgore** · 12-12-2009, 14:55

I'd love to see a latin or ancient greek version of EB. :D

**Skullheadhq** · 12-13-2009, 16:46

Ancient Greek isn't suppported in RTW, but latin would be cool.

**vartan** · 12-18-2009, 22:36

Originally Posted by Skullheadhq

Ancient Greek isn't suppported in RTW, but latin would be cool.

Does M2TW support Unicode? or is it solely ANSI character set? If Unicode support exists in M2TW I would love to learn what needs to be modified in order to do a complete translation for both Esperanto and Armenian.

**Tellos Athenaios** · 12-18-2009, 23:25

A clarification:

The M2TW engine uses its own text rendering system. This system is best understood as two components:

The first component in this system is that a font consists of bitmaps which draw the alpha channel of a glyph (in this system a glyph is equivalent to a character). Apart from that the font contains an embedded translation tables that serve to map input codes to a bitmap, as well as dimensions (the bitmaps are flattened, concatenated sequences of bytes without pre- or suf- fixes so dimensions have to be encoded in a separate table or else the rendering engine cannot properly draw the glyphs). That is roughly what a CUF file amounts to.

This font is defined in such a way that there is room for exactly 65534 (0xFFFE) glyphs (the 0x00 symbol cannot be used). What those glyphs correspond to is up to whoever creates a font (and it is in fact not too hard to take a given font and turn it into a M2TW font, I've done that for a couple of experiments). There's some other constraints as well; but these do not (further) affect how many characters can be drawn with a given font.

A second component of the system is that text is encoded by the engine in a series of key-value pairs (anyone familiar with the various text files will recognize that this key-value format is apparent even in source form) and spit out as a binary blob. It is this blob which is read by the engine when it tries to render text (experiments of mine confirm that too). There are probably last-modified-time checks going on to ensure that these blobs are kept in sync with the source file; at any rate it is possible to modify these blobs and see the result in M2TW without touching the original text files.

The M2TW engine apparently contains a converter for well-formed Unicode (UTF-16 to be more precise); but again, it is possible to roll your own as the output format is fairly trivial and the M2TW does not overwrite the blobs that have been modified since the last edit to a text file -- or at least did not do this during my experiments with them.

What does this lead to?

The core, text-rendering engine itself of M2TW is not limited to a single or any character set.
The default fonts of M2TW are limited though (e.g. the decorative font used in headers by the Vanilla English/EU flavour is limited to 271 characters, one of which is the NULL therefore it has only 270 usable characters).
The default text input you can feed to M2TW in descriptions is limited to UTF-16 input. But not all characters may be rendered as inteded, see (2).
We at EB have plans that go beyond the default.