What is the pronoun replacement system and can I turn it off?

[JonChambers]

I'm working on Lady's Choice. A game about choosing which gentleman you will marry. These gentlemen have pronouns which are static. The gentlemen do not become ladies (that's a different game I'll be uploading later).

So, for example,

Code: Select all

clienttranslate( 'You courted Gentleman ${gent_no} and discovered his attribute: "${attribute}"' )

, would it become

Code: Select all

clienttranslate( 'You courted Gentleman ${gent_no} and discovered HER attribute: "${attribute}"' )

for female players? I hope not. That would not be the intended experience, and ironically would be a system that works perfectly for male players but ruins the experience for female players. The exact opposite of what the pronoun replacement system was designed to do.

(That exact example may not have made the bug appear, but I'm sure other examples in my code will.)

As for player pronouns, I've been avoiding them, but when forced I use the pronoun of the player's role not the player themself. (For 2p, all players are ladies. For 3+p you take it in turns to be a lady.)

(I know it will make males uncomfortable being called by female pronouns, but it makes me happy to know that these will likely be the same males who think females should not be uncomfortable with male pronouns.)

Also, while I'm here, there is a lot of data uploaded to an English csv file as well as a sprite image with English writing. How would I go about getting them flagged for translation? I'm happy to help where necessary. (I'm guessing translators prefer not to do image editing themselves.)

[Tisaac]

Have your read the doc about how translations work ?

[JonChambers]

Have your read the doc about how translations work ?

Several times over. It doesn't seem to go into the specifics.

[Tisaac]

Have your read the doc about how translations work ?

Several times over. It doesn't seem to go into the specifics.

Then I am confused about your last paragraph.
Of course translator wont change game assets, they dont even have directe access to that. Go try to translate some strings to see how it looks like. And what is this csv file that you are talking about ? Doc are pretty clear how strings can be marked and used by the translation system.

[JonChambers]

Have your read the doc about how translations work ?

Several times over. It doesn't seem to go into the specifics.

Then I am confused about your last paragraph.
Of course translator wont change game assets, they dont even have directe access to that. Go try to translate some strings to see how it looks like. And what is this csv file that you are talking about ? Doc are pretty clear how strings can be marked and used by the translation system.

If you can find the section that says how to mark a CSV for translation, I shall eat my hat.

I know how to do it in PHP and Javascript, but that's all.

[Tisaac]

Several times over. It doesn't seem to go into the specifics.

Then I am confused about your last paragraph.
Of course translator wont change game assets, they dont even have directe access to that. Go try to translate some strings to see how it looks like. And what is this csv file that you are talking about ? Doc are pretty clear how strings can be marked and used by the translation system.

If you can find the section that says how to mark a CSV for translation, I shall eat my hat.

I know how to do it in PHP and Javascript, but that's all.

Exactly, why would you think there is another way to do it than php and js then ???
And why are you using csv in the first place ?

[JonChambers]

One csv file per language seems sensible, and far easier to edit and manage. The extra control means I can make sure the translated art and translated strings match.

Also having it go through me means I can update the art when a new translator spots a mistranslation.

Storing data as php text gets messy fast. CSV and sql are much nicer to scroll through and find errors in, especially with the rightmost columns lining up perfectly.

[Tisaac]

One csv file per language seems sensible, and far easier to edit and manage. The extra control means I can make sure the translated art and translated strings match.

Also having it go through me means I can update the art when a new translator spots a mistranslation.

Storing data as php text gets messy fast. CSV and sql are much nicer to scroll through and find errors in, especially with the rightmost columns lining up perfectly.

I still don't understand what you are talking about. The translation system is 100% handled by BGA framework. People are not going to edit csv file inside your repo. Again, just go try to translate some string in the translation system to understand how it work from the translator point of vue (Community > translation).

[Idsky]

One csv file per language seems sensible, and far easier to edit and manage.
…
Storing data as php text gets messy fast. CSV and sql are much nicer to scroll through and find errors in, especially with the rightmost columns lining up perfectly.

You have to use the BGA translation system. All your text strings will get translated into many languages for free!
Manually doing them all yourself sure isn't 'far easier' and will just annoy everyone because it is completely non-standard for BGA games. You can format your PHP file so that the columns line up in that.

If your image resources have embedded text, you may want to see if you can remove that, leaving just the graphical background, and place text on top of them at runtime, so no image translations are needed. CSS can do pretty text, even stuff like vertical upright text. As a bonus, only different-background cards need image resources, possibly saving a lot of file game-loading time. I seriously doubt you want to maintain dozens of sets of images for all the languages that BGA supports.

[JonChambers]

If your image resources have embedded text, you may want to see if you can remove that, leaving just the graphical background, and place text on top of them at runtime, so no image translations are needed. CSS can do pretty text, even stuff like vertical upright text. As a bonus, only different-background cards need image resources, possibly saving a lot of file game-loading time. I seriously doubt you want to maintain dozens of sets of images for all the languages that BGA supports.

Still waiting on my first question getting a response. Maybe I should have made two posts instead of one.

Anyway, that's going to be quite the challenge. Extremely low on my priorities, but still possible.

This is because the heading (which is the most important part) follows a curved text path, or two curved text paths if it's a particularly long title.

This means writing some CSS that defines all three curves that aligns with a sprite of no fixed dimensions.

It also means defining both possible text box shapes the game comes with. (Yes, I know this is all possible, but defining text curves in CSS takes a lot of trial and error to get right.)

My ideal outcome would be an admin posting "if you translate this file, tell me your username and I'll credit you for 70 translation strings" then I get the file and do all the work in photoshop, where I can check each title by eye and manually make adjustments if it's unreadable.

If I rely on the framework for translation, it's just too difficult to test. There might be some combination of letters that forces a two line title yet makes it unreadable from a collision between a "p" on the top with an "f" on the bottom, or some craziness like that. Sure, each example of what could go wrong, I can try to replicate ahead of time and test, but the thing that will inevitably go wrong will likely be something I haven't even thought of.

The pronoun replacement system also has me nervous that the game will be unplayable for women, which I expect will make up 60% of my customer base. (If I set my gender to female, can I test it while still in studio mode?)

An extra difficulty is the context of translation. For example, "very tall" I'm sure could translate into different languages in many ways, but which is the way that I intended? My game has 70 attributes, each with very short titles like this. But there is no context.

The context is that these are attributes a gentleman may have, along with a point value that determines how this attribute impacts how valuable he is as a potential husband.

Let's suppose the translator correctly guesses that "very tall" is the attribute of a person, and not an architectural or geographical term, and so they translate it to a word that's used as a mocking slur, like "lanky giant". This will create a disconnect between the meaning and the +6 value, as players will wonder what's so great about a lanky giant that makes him better husband material.

I get and appreciate what the framework is for and how it makes life so much easier, but right now it seems to be getting in the way. Perhaps I can remove all my translation tags and do this manually. Crediting the translator will require just a little admin intervention, but it will be worth it.

And before someone mentions how difficult this will be to maintain for the next developer, I'm not going anywhere. This is a game that's been in my mind since 2008 that I've been working on since early 2020. I am the game designer, the publisher, and the developer. For me to have a shot at selling physical copies of this game, I need a place to direct tens of thousands of players to play it (yes, tens of thousands, I know what I said) which means I should be receiving a fair wage to stay here and keep it maintained. (I'm even contemplating putting up big cash prizes for BGA tournament winners, but that's a forum post for the future.)

After all, the game has a sequel planned, which requires me to upload not just that, but two other games that can be played by combining both sets. I'm not going anywhere. If a translator sends me a file, I can probably get it fully integrated within 24 hours.

Also, if there is enough demand, it will be awesome to have the translated images already on file ready to send off to the printer. So doing it in CSS won't save me any time because I'll have to go back to photoshop anyway.