Language mods

[Kurulham]

Good morning, all and sundry.

Because I am a colossal nerd, and an almost-as-colossal philellen, I've been going through and replacing the Greek in the various display files (EU, expanded_bi, SHARED, etc.) with actual Greek. I personally like my Σωματοφυλακες Στρατηγου much better than I ever did my Somatophylakes Strategou.

But that's me; would anyone be interested in seeing this sort of thing, or something even more extensive, posted? I have demented fantasies of playing as a Hellenistic faction and seeing no word on the screen that wasn't in Greek (probably an oddish mix of Attic and Koine, given the time period); not bloody likely to happen, of course, but is anyone outside myself interested in moving in that direction?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Since it won't be too terribly long before the next release is out, could you talk with some folks about how to possibly work a way to replace those text entries automatically? I don't know if that's possible really, but I'd just hate to see us update something and all your work be out the window on it. If you *could* find a way to do it automatically, it would be easy to keep it updated for future builds.

[Kurulham]

Shouldn't be too difficult, actually; auto-find/replaces are fairly easy to do. The main problem is making sure the installer can understand the Unicode.

Unfortunately the Neo-Punic alphabet doesn't appear to be in Unicode, so the Qart-Hadastim may have to make do with an archaic alphabet... ::hums and grins::

Should I take that as a "yes, I'm interested and I think other people might be too"?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Oh, sorry to give that impression. Just trying to give a little advice - I've got my hands more than full with EB, and all those Latin tests I should be grading right now too. ()

[Kurulham]

Hmm, mistaken communications all around, I suppose. I'm not asking for help; I'll be doing this whether or not anyone else cares. Just if other people want to see it I'll go to the trouble of making the installer vice doing the changes by hand, because they actually only took about an hour to do and the installer'll be a pain in the neck.

[madmatg]

i would definitely be up for the nerdiness, i studied attic greek my first year in college and this will be an easy way for me to at least keep up my ability to read and remember vocabulary, if not those evil endings

[Christianus]

I would defedently use this mod for my game!!! Wonderful idea!

[Mouzafphaerre]

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I'm definitely interested.

Since not all period scripts are in Unicode, some remotely suitable replacements can be considered, such as Hebrew for Kart-Hadasht and Arabic for Saba.
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[Tellos Athenaios]

First of all: hey you stole my idea! (Back before 0.81 was out...)

However, I must inform you that changing settlement names in descriptions will require you to edit a bunch of other files (trait & script) as well; as would changing the names of generals... So for your own sake I suggest you don't do this unless you are really familiar with all the files involved.

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But apart from that I think this is a wonderful idea. Mind you that the next release will come with some heavily edited descriptions though.

[Christianus]

Kurulham: Are you planning to replace all the text, or just parts of it, like the unit names?

[Admetos]

I'd certainly be interested in this, I think it would definetly add something to the game. One question though, would you still keep a translation of the name in english, eg. Σωματοφυλακες Στρατηγου (Somatophylakes Strategou).

[Kurulham]

Progress update!

I've changed the unit labels, and I'm working on changing the map labels (turning "Ptolemaioi Diplomat" into "Κηρυξ Πτολεμαικος", for example).

Tellos: I ran into the problem you mentioned and am working on acquiring the necessary familiarity. I had changed the settlement names and was enjoying life as the KH until I realized I couldn't save or load. D'oh!

Admetos: Personally, I like not having the English explanations there beside the Greek; I end up looking at the English. So I've been taking them off.

Christianus: Heh! My sick fantasies involve eventually turning the entire game into Greek, but baby steps, baby steps; especially with a beta build... not to mention my Greek has more rust on it than the Kitty Hawk's anchor chain. So I'm sticking to labels for the time being.

[The Persian Cataphract]

This is of course all very interesting especially if it could be realized for all native languages, but it would probably be biased towards Greek sensibilities as I do not know how strong Unicode support is for Chaldaeo-Aramaic/Pahlavî script, though I imagine the problem being less for Armenia since one could easily derive the Armenian alphabet as formalized by medieval Armenian sages. For Saka we'd entirely have to rely on Sanskrit, since none of have any knowledge on Khotanese-Saka script. Sauromatae would be at risk of being excluded completely from such an endeavour.

[Sarkiss]

i would love to see the idea implemented. it'd be truly in EB style

[Kurulham]

This is of course all very interesting especially if it could be realized for all native languages, but it would probably be biased towards Greek sensibilities as I do not know how strong Unicode support is for Chaldaeo-Aramaic/Pahlavî script, though I imagine the problem being less for Armenia since one could easily derive the Armenian alphabet as formalized by medieval Armenian sages. For Saka we'd entirely have to rely on Sanskrit, since none of have any knowledge on Khotanese-Saka script. Sauromatae would be at risk of being excluded completely from such an endeavour.

One also runs across the issue of areas of cultural intersection: do we call it Tarentum or Ταρας, Επιδαμνος or Δυρραχιον or Dyrrhachium, Hangmatana or Εκβατανα? In the end it'll be very difficult to avoid bias towards one culture or another.

For my personal use, I've chosen a very direct answer to the problem: ignore it completely and embrace Hellenocentrism. I realize this isn't to everyone's taste, though, so I'm preparing two versions of the installer: one to convert only Greek to Greek, and one to convert EVERYTHING to its Greek name (or best approximation, if I can't find a historical Greek name for something).

I should also note that I will not be including accents; while Unicode support for them is absolutely fine, the RTW engine doesn't display the accented character. Go figure.

[Christianus]

Darn! I realy love and embrace your mod idea, truly EB style as Sarkiss says, but... Its gonna be a brainbattle to read all the unit descriptions in Attic greek! You wouldnt consider making a version where the unit descriptions are intact in English? I would love to see the name of the greek cities in Greek:)
How can a guy from as far away as Japan be such a philèllines?

[Tellos Athenaios]

One also runs across the issue of areas of cultural intersection: do we call it Tarentum or Ταρας, Επιδαμνος or Δυρραχιον or Dyrrhachium, Hangmatana or Εκβατανα? In the end it'll be very difficult to avoid bias towards one culture or another.

For my personal use, I've chosen a very direct answer to the problem: ignore it completely and embrace Hellenocentrism. I realize this isn't to everyone's taste, though, so I'm preparing two versions of the installer: one to convert only Greek to Greek, and one to convert EVERYTHING to its Greek name (or best approximation, if I can't find a historical Greek name for something).

I should also note that I will not be including accents; while Unicode support for them is absolutely fine, the RTW engine doesn't display the accented character. Go figure.

Because it doesn't matter what encoding you use; but what font you use. And the engine uses two fonts: Verdana & another one which I must look up.

Anyhow both font sets don't contain characters with accents; hence they are not displayed. And I have tried to see if you could add a new font to the game; but that sadly is impossible (hardcoded). Otherwise one could've used Paleo Lineotype -- it supports both an enhanced Greek character set; and the full Latin garb. (At the cost of axing Arab & Chinese/Vietnamese/Japanese characters.)

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Theoretically, you can hack it renaming Verdana to something else and renaming your favourite font Verdana, both internally and externally. (There must be a Microsoft Power Toy to do that. Otherwise you'll need Fontographer etc.)

Of course, that works unless the engine has its own packed in Verdana.

As for Arabic, the only decent looking font is Traditional Arabic (typographic Nesḥ). All the rest look garbage. Ironically, Tahoma includes the most characters in that script but at the same time is one of the ugliest.
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[A Terribly Harmful Name]

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Theoretically, you can hack it renaming Verdana to something else and renaming your favourite font Verdana, both internally and externally. (There must be a Microsoft Power Toy to do that. Otherwise you'll need Fontographer etc.)

Of course, that works unless the engine has its own packed in Verdana.

As for Arabic, the only decent looking font is Traditional Arabic (typographic Nesḥ). All the rest look garbage. Ironically, Tahoma includes the most characters in that script but at the same time is one of the ugliest.
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If they do all the game in Classical Greek I would be more than pleased. Playing makes me learn better than any Grammar.

[Kurulham]

Darn! I realy love and embrace your mod idea, truly EB style as Sarkiss says, but... Its gonna be a brainbattle to read all the unit descriptions in Attic greek! You wouldnt consider making a version where the unit descriptions are intact in English? I would love to see the name of the greek cities in Greek:)
How can a guy from as far away as Japan be such a philèllines?

What I'm going to do (once I get the damn thing properly figured out; city names are still kind of kicking my ass) is to have options on the installer for each type of stuff: one each for city names, unit names, building names, map object labels, etc.

As to the Japan thing, I'm a classically-educated American sailor; I just got off a tour onboard USS Curtis Wilbur, and I'm working at the shipyard while I wait on transfer back to the States.

Sometime in the vicinity of this weekend I'll make available what I've got of the modification so far; it's not installerized yet, so if you want to see it you'll have to replace files. Sorry about that.