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German version support #8
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Your assumption is correct. The original data files are not supported and compatibility was broken by original developers even before the sources were released under GPL. While it is possible to add support for the original data files later, my current priority is to make the game playable all the way to the end and improve the less-than-perfect English translation. I can clean up and upload my Python scripts for extracting data from the original game files. But in order to merge the original German translation into this repository, we'll need permission from @vslavik, the rest of the original development team and possibly also the German distributor. Otherwise someone will have to make a new German translation from scratch. |
I guess the scripts to extract the game data would be really helpful - that way one could just generate the files oneself independent of the license situation. (The German distributor has gone out of business a long time ago, so it may be difficult to find the current license holder...) |
We do not hold the rights for German localization, they were entirely with the distributor. |
In that case, data conversion script is the only thing we can add to this repo. @laenion I need you to look into the texts.dat file and tell me two things:
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Sure!
The texts.dat file is a bit strange, as the first paragraph seems to be in Czech, but I haven't found any encoding which would decode it correctly - so I assume that the paragraph is unused and its encoding was broken during the translation process. All the other paragraphs are in German, which will correctly decode with
Only a few files seem to have a prefix, but for those that do it's |
The Czech paragraph is most likely encoded in KEYBCS2. I've pushed the extraction scripts to the
Note that the main menu bitmaps and a few text files were copied from the English sources. That's because the files were either missing in the original data or they were not usable for technical reasons (main menu button layout is different in the GPL version). |
Also, all assets in texts.dat should have a prefix. If |
Thanks a lot for the commit and the detailed instructions, I have a working German version now (except for the main menu of course). Just a few notes:
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Yes, you can safely delete the 'þ' characters, they were non-printable in the original fonts. The same codepoint (0xFE) was assigned to a filled square character in KEYBCS2, probably some sort of editor marker. You can ignore the err*.txt files, they seem to be left over from early DOS version of the game and they're not used anywhere AFAICT. I'll probably delete them from this repo later. Fixed udes55.txt in the extraction script. Just to be safe, it's better to copy the missing file from the English translation. |
I had to add a new text file Apart from that, did you find any other issues with the extracted German data or can I close this ticket? |
I haven't really played the game any further so far, but these were all problems I've found so far. If I should find anything else in the future then I'll just open a new ticket. Thanks a lot for all your work! |
Thanks, closing. |
I recently got my hands onto a German version of the game, and of course I was eager to check whether I could use the game data with the open source version. Unfortunately it didn't work out: The game is crashing with a segmentation fault when trying to open the main menu after the intro movies:
What did I do? I've put all the .dat files from disc into a new directory called de, namely anims.dat, fonts.dat, graphics.dat, missions.dat, music.dat, screens.dat, sounds16.dat, sounds8.dat and texts.dat.
I assume the file format is just too old / incompatible with the current engine revision?
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