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Description
Currently, all game strings are packaged into the drodN_0.dat
or drodrpgN_0.dat
files. Since these files are also used to distribute the proprietary media and official game content, this adds some problems for localisation:
- Adding a new officially supported localisation requires a new full installer to be issued that has a
dat
file containing the required strings - It's essentially impossible for someone to create and distribute an unofficial localisation
My rough idea for a solution is to add another static message database, which is dynamically loaded based on the current active language. This would be loaded from a dat
file named using the appropriate language code that live in the data directory. So for example, strings for a Latin translation would be loaded in from a lat.dat
file. The game would attempt to get strings from the "localisation" table first, then it would do the existing lookup methods.
This would also require a change to DRODUtil to be able to create single-language dat
files. I'm thinking the best way is with a new command that takes a path to a directory containing uni
files, and a language code. Then it creates an appropriately named dat
file and fills it with strings for the given language.
Having to use DRODUtil to do this is something of barrier, but it's possible to provide a pre-compiled version of it with a script file to do the difficult parts. That's more of a concern if we actually do the technical side, of course.