Translations

[drdnar]

The dungeon file architecture makes adding language translations fairly straightforward: just translate the dungeon file, and rebuilt that file.

Some additional code changes will be required to support fully other languages:

• The string input routine only supports basic ASCII---and not even all printable ASCII can be typed. More sophisticated IME code will be required if you want vocabulary containing non-ASCII characters.
• There are still strings scattered throughout the code that are embedded in the code, instead of being fetched from the dungeon file. These strings should also be fetched from the dungeon file.
• To support fetching strings from the dungeon file outside of the game loop, the dungeon file should be loaded at startup. (There's no obvious way to handle translating the "dungeon file missing" message. . . .)
• The Huffman decoding tree format I'm currently using is reasonably fast and compact, but is limited to 7-bit output codes. Supporting other languages needing characters not found in basic ASCII will either require a new Huffman tree format to support 8-bit output codes; or, if all languages we want to support can be squeezed into 120ish code points, a character translation table to map a custom per-language 7-bit code page into a standard 8-bit code page.
• Need to make sure make_dungeon[_calc].py will translate Unicode in the input adventure.yaml to the correct output code page.
• FontLibC fully supports up to 255 printable glyphs, so supporting non-Latin-alphabet languages won't require much additional code---will just want to ensure that the font used to display it has the correct code page. (Note that FontLibC does not support logographic/ideographic scripts, unless fewer than 255 glyphs are required.)

I have no plans to produce any translations myself, but contact me if you would like to provide a translation.